


Mending the pieces

by jotunemo



Series: Another little piece of my mind [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Amnesia, Asexuality, Assisted Suicide, Awesome Frigga (Marvel), Brodinson feels, Cancer, Child Abandonment, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Disordered Eating, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Doesn't he always, Drug Withdrawal, Emotional Abuse, Family Drama, Flashbacks, Gen, Healing, Hela does too, Human AU, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Leah is a precious angel, Loki (Marvel) Angst, Loki Feels, Loki Needs a Hug, Lots of talking in this one, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Odin tries to be better, Other, Pornography, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prostitution, Protective Frigga (Marvel), Protective Thor, Recovery, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Self-Harming Loki, Self-Hatred, Sexual Abuse, Sorry Not Sorry, Substance Abuse, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt, Suicide Notes, Therapy, Thor alternate universe, Thor is a Good Bro (Marvel), Underage Prostitution, ace Loki, brodinson fluff, he'll get a lot of hugs this time around though, i removed the major character death warning because I feel like it stops people from reading this, loss of appetite, lots of psychology, protective big brother feels, teenage loki, tw hospitals, tw organ failure, tw respiratory distress, ye been warned, ye been warned for countless chapters now
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:53:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29240145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jotunemo/pseuds/jotunemo
Summary: Loki has returned home convinced he has been Hela's son all is life, his memories of Frigga and Thor still dissociated from his consciousness. Will he remember and what will happen if he does? Will he forget his time with Thanos and Hela? Will Robin's and Loki's memories split or converge? Will the family dynamic change through therapy? How will Hela cope with her drug cravings and her terminal disease?Read to find out.
Relationships: Frigga | Freyja & Loki (Marvel), Loki & Odin (Marvel), Loki & Thor (Marvel), Thor & Leah, Thor & Nikias, Thor/Valkyrie
Series: Another little piece of my mind [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1751101
Comments: 124
Kudos: 59





	1. No more false memories

**Author's Note:**

> This is the fifth installment of a series and won't make any sense whatsoever without its predecessors.

**_December 24 th, 2019_ **

  
  
**_About three months after the incident_ **

_Loki, wait_.

There is that accursed name again and, as soon as it has been spoken, the desert dreamscape he has been roaming around shifts and Robin finds himself in the jungle, staring into the piercing eyes of The Voice, who grabs him by the arm to hold him in place. He flinches because, even in dream, he knows that whatever The Voice wants, it’s urgent and significant and Robin doesn’t particularly enjoy the sensation of weighty urgency, which is a usually a harbinger of drama and doom in Loki’s case. Robin’s case.

 _Wait_ , _what_?

He panics and his heart beats faster, thumping wildly in his chest, flushing his cheeks hot. He jerks back and flees. The jungle grows hazy in the corners of his vision and then he’s back, but not in the desert, no, he’s in LA, running up a street, cars speeding by in a blur to his right, waves crashing onto the beach to his left side. He stops in front of a house he never saw before, a small Italian villa towering over the ocean, half-hidden behind majestic trees. He pauses, gasping at the sandstoned beauty in awe. _Borson Odinson Fjörgyndottir residence_ , it says on an ornate brass plate.

_Lokeeee!_

_Shit_ , Robin gasps and bolts again. He keeps running until the scenery shifts again and now he’s standing in front of a school building. _Infinity High_ , it says here. _Home of the Warriors_. He sprints inside, trying to outrun The Voice, and finds himself directly on the stands of the football stadium—corridors and classrooms are for the waking world, tsk—surrounded by screeching students, parents, teachers, all of them faceless, like the players, a team of fuzzy blobs, except for one. He is tall, over six feet probably and musclier than an ancient Viking god, with a blond mane, an even tan and a smile so radiant it could cut through diamonds. He has this particular center-of-the-known-universe vibe to him that makes Robin feel small and insignificant, and he hurries on, glimpsing the name on the guy’s jersey nonetheless. _Odinson_.

 _Thor Odinson_ , thinks Robin and he wonders how he knows this because he doesn’t particularly like football—it’s a caveman-ish game that propagates toxic masculinity, glamorizing physical violence as an inherently male trait—but he does. He just _knows_ that the guy on the field with the Teflon charisma who makes the whole crowd swoon is Thor Odinson. _The quarterback_.

 _Brother_ …

 _What the hell_?

No time for this. Robin finds a bathroom and slips inside, realizing too late that it’s already occupied by three guys. Their leader is black, with shaved hair on both sides and a crop of dreadlocks drifting down on the right, his dark eyes glinting with contempt, hatred even, bloodlust. _Who said fags are allowed in the men’s room_? snarls he and the others, insipid tag-alongs with no distinctive features or character traits, snicker. They remind him of Thanos’s henchmen; one shared brain cell but enough brawn between them to smash Robin into a bloody pulp.

 _Yikes_.

That wasn’t the plan. _Wake up or change the dream_. _Just focus_. _You can do it_. _Lucid dreaming_. _You’ve done it before_. He can’t do it now. They attack him and shove him so violently that he stumbles backwards, tripping over his own feet and landing flat on his skinny ass with a loud and embarrassing thud. They move in, beat him up, insulting him in very imaginative ways— _not_ —and then the leader— _his name is Erik_ , _isn’t it_?—takes his clothes, forcing him to flee naked.

_Loki!_

_That’s not my fucking name! That’s not my fucking school! That’s not my fucking life! Get the fuck out._

_Just wait. Please._

_NO!_

Robin flees again, running through the corridors buck ass naked and, suddenly, all the people who were in the stadium before are inside the school and everyone is howling with derisive laughter but it doesn’t matter, no, he _just_ has to reach the door at the end of this seemingly never-ending hallway, just a few more strides, a few more, you can do this, this is just a dream, it’s just a dream, you’ll wake up soon, and _THERE_ are the push-doors and, _FINALLY_ , thank the heavens, he’s finally outside …

Well, except that he’s not. He walked straight into a hospital room and he can see himself on the bed, no, wait, his body is lying on a steel table and the medical examiner is about to y-incision his chest and—

 _Loki_ , whimpers Leah, who suddenly stands right behind him, her black hair waving and whirling in a peculiar indoor breeze. She looks terrified, confused, her huge eyes pleading with him.

Robin jerks away. No more nightmares! No more false memories! No more!

 _JUST NO_!!

He turns around and Leah is gone. In her stead stands the woman he saw in his dreams before and she stretches out her hand, squeezing his shoulder, smiling, and he panics because there’s that same urgency wafting off of her and why the fuck can’t he just wake up???

* * *

“Shshshshssh,” Frigga murmurs, squeezing Loki’s shoulder as he writhes beneath the covers, soft moans of agony escaping through his trembling lips, sweat pooling on his forehead. “You’re having a bad dream, honey. You’re safe. If you wake up, you’ll be safe, I promise.”

Loki cries out, then gasps, and then his eyes fly open. His beautiful green eyes, like two gleaming mirrors into a dark world of terror and confusion.

“Hey,” says Frigga as calmly as she can but, just as Thor—who took off to get his brother decent clothes and toiletries more than three hours ago—predicted, the moment Loki realizes he can’t sit up because the restraints are holding him down, his eyes widen. He draws a hectic breath and starts to squirm.

“I-I can’t,” he wails, tears welling into his eyes. “N-not today, I can’t, I’m … everything hurts. Please, not today.”

“You d-don’t have to do a-anything,” Frigga tries to shush him in a stammer, speaking around the lump rapidly growing in her throat. “You’re in the psychiatric intensive care unit, honey. You’re safe here. Whoever … Whatever happened to you before, they can’t … harm you here.”

Loki takes another deep, ragged breath and then he starts screaming. “Get _off_ me!” He thrashes in his restraints, bony hips arching up and down, and Frigga inevitably thinks about the ligature marks, the rape kit, his injuries, and the images coming alive in her mind with disgusting clarity make her dry-heave as she tries to shush him even though there’s no shushing someone who’s having a flashback, _no_ , she knows this but she’d be damned if she didn’t try to soothe him anyway.

“Get off!” Loki howls. “Leave me alone! Leave me _alone_! _STAY AWAY_ _FROM ME_!”

A nurse clatters into the room, alarmed by her son’s screams. “He’s having a flashback,” Frigga grinds out. “Take off the restraints! _Please_!”

“I’ll get Dr. Wilson,” she says and she’s out of the door again before Frigga can even reply.

“Please, honey, you’re safe here,” Frigga tries, placing her hand on Loki’s head, trying to ground him, trying to remember everything Dr. van Dyne told her, everything she read. “You’re safe. You’re having a flashback. I know it feels real to you right now but you’re not there anymore. You’re home. You’re _here_ , with me.” Her voice breaks and she wishes Thor were back already because, peculiarly enough, despite his temper, he’s so much better and calmer at this, but her eldest is taking his own sweet time and may she be damned for plunging straight back into old patterns!

“That’s good,” Dr. Wilson encourages her as he marches into the room. “You’re doing well, Miss Fjörgyndottir, but please try not to touch him. Being touched without permission might make him feel even more trapped.”

Frigga withdraws her hand. “I-I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” says Dr. Wilson. “Hey, Loki. Can you do me a favor? Can you maybe try to describe the room for me?”

“Stop,” Loki pants, his voice wavering. “Get off.”

“I’m not doing anything to you, Loki. Focus on my voice, alright? My voice comes from somewhere else than where you are right now, right? Focus on that. Focus on my voice.”

Loki almost chokes on the breath he’s trying to draw and Frigga feels as though she’ll implode because not touching him goes so very far against her primal instincts that she almost sees stars. It takes all she has to force herself to stay calm enough to take mental notes for the next time this is inevitably going to happen.

“That’s good. Breathe. Take a deep, slow breath, yes, that’s good,” Dr. Wilson continues when Loki tries to comply. “Take deep breaths and focus on my voice. In and out, in and out, yes, you’re doing fine. You’re doing great. Now, tell me what you see. Look around the room and tell me what you see.”

“Why?” Loki breathes, slowly emerging from the flashback.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s stupid,” Loki wheezes after a pause. “You aren’t blind, are you?”

Frigga’s heart swells because, despite the obvious distress he’s in, at least, he acts and speaks and looks like Loki again. Thank God for small favors.

Dr. Wilson smiles. “No. I was just trying to ground you.”

“No need.” Loki takes a few deep breaths and then his eyes travel the room as he’s slowly composing himself, as always trying to hide how much distress he is truly in. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the psychiatric intensive care unit,” Dr. Wilson explains.

Loki’s eyes go wide. “Psychiatric … why?”

“Because you self-harmed last night.”

“Now that was not the answer I was expecting.” Loki’s voice is still weak but he laughs anyway, a faint sound with a paper-thin echo of the despair that lies deep within him. “That revelation was rather anticlimactic, let me tell you.” He flashes the doctor one of his best ostensibly shy I-wouldn’t-harm-a-fly smiles he used to butter Frigga up all his life. “But I assure you there’s no danger of me harming myself presently, so would you mind taking off the restraints?” And out come the puppy eyes. “Please? They are rather uncomfortable.”

He appears calm, collected, reasonable even. If Frigga didn’t know him, she might even fall for the act.

“Can you promise me that you won’t try to bolt or hurt yourself again if I take them off?” Dr. Wilson asks. “These are for your own safety, you know.”

“Of course,” Loki grumbles. “You’re _so_ considerate, aren’t you?” He snorts before he shatters Frigga’s hopes with four harmless little words which, spoken together, in this context, hurt far worse than a knife thrusted into her gut. “Where is my mother?”

Dr. Wilson’s jaw twitches slightly but that’s the only thing giving away his momentary surprise and Frigga fumes inwardly because he shouldn’t be this surprised after they _told_ him about Loki’s condition. Apparently, being a PTSD specialist does not require possessing extensive knowledge about DID. “She’s, uh—”

“She’s in police custody,” Frigga cuts in on pure instinct and her heart begins to sink rapidly when it dawns on her just how nerve-rackingly complicated of a process her son’s recovery is going to be.

“She just got out of rehab.” Loki—Robin?—snorts, then cackles. “This woman is unbelievable. What did she do?”

“She neglected you,” Frigga treads carefully, asking Dr. Wilson for permission with a quick, prompting glance in his direction. He nods almost imperceptibly. “She let you stay with her ex-boyfriend, who very obviously physically abused you.”

“He didn’t,” Robin-Loki starts but then seems to think better of it. “We, uh, had an arrangement.”

“An arrangement?” Frigga blurts out before she can stop herself, her stomach filling with ice.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

“That’s none of your business,” Robin-Loki informs her abruptly and his words nebulize her thoughts. It’s mind-boggling, really, that her son is _right there_ but still so far gone that she can’t even reach him. “Who are you, anyway? You don’t look like a doctor.”

Frigga inhales deeply, gathering all her courage for the leap of faith she is about to take. “I’m a friend,” she settles on saying, feeling like a shameless liar but, then again, once this one sentence is out, more words follow and can’t even stop them because he obviously can’t handle the truth right now, can he, _no_ , he doesn’t remember his childhood, doesn’t remember the comfort she gave him, doesn’t remember her love. “I knew your mother when she had you. I’m your guardian. I’m supposed to look after you in case anything happens to her.”

Robin-Loki looks doubtful but then he slowly nods.

“How is your head?” asks Dr. Wilson, taking control of the conversation again.

“My head? Fine, I guess?”

“You guess? Does it hurt? Do you have a headache or feel dizzy?”

“I’m sure the blood sample you took from me told you I was on drugs, so what do you want me to say to that, huh?” Anger flares up in his eyes and the resemblance to Hela is undeniable. “There’s no need to patronize me, okay?”

Listening to their conversation makes Frigga feel as if she’s sitting in a dentist chair and having her teeth pulled even though that sensation is nothing compared to how painful it is to listen to Loki’s utter cluelessness.

“I wasn’t trying to … You gave yourself a concussion,” Dr. Wilson elaborates. “You banged your head against the window multiple times. Your forehead needed seven stitches.”

“Looks like I’m getting more creative, huh?” Robin-Loki chuckles and it’s hard to remind herself that this isn’t her Loki because he acts so much like her Loki that Frigga is beginning to have serious doubts whether she’ll ever get to the bottom of his condition.

Dr. Wilson doesn’t laugh. “Do you remember why you did it?”

“You heard her, didn’t you? My mom was arrested,” her son says quietly and Frigga’s lips open by their own accord in response to how smoothly he’s weaving his reply with what little information he has just been given. He’d make Odin so proud on the stand. “I suppose that was a little upsetting for me. She’s been in rehab for months and I waited for her to get home and then she drives all the way through the Mojave with me and then she gets herself arrested on her first day of freedom? That’s bound to shake you up a little, doesn’t it? Because who knows what happens to me now, right? Or when I can go home?”

He’s deflecting as always and Dr. Wilson does take the bait. Kind of. “Listen, you won’t be able to go back home anytime soon,” he explains softly and shock washes over Robin-Loki. “Your biological mother has been arrested for child endangerment and the environment you spent the last few months in—”

“What are you talking about? She didn’t _endanger_ me,” he huffs and then he starts thrashing again, his limbs rattling the restraints. “Untie me now! I want to go _home_!”

“I’m sorry, Loki, but—”

“MY NAME IS ROBIN!” His face is all bulging eyes and vibrating cheekbones now.

“Robin, of course.” Dr. Wilson breathes in to collect himself. “I’m afraid you won’t be going home any time soon. You’ll stay here with us until you are physically better and then we’ll transfer you to a facility specialized in the inpatient treatment of PTSD and dissociative disorders and, after that, we can talk about custody issues.”

“Says who?” growls Robin.

There is a pause. “Child Services.”

“What?” Robin gasps, his voice reduced to an incredulous whisper, his eyes widening again. “You got CPS involved? That’s fucking incredible! My mom checked herself into rehab when she got worse! She tried to get better, for me. You can’t do that to her _or_ me! She didn’t do anything _wrong_! She was trying, for fuck’s sake! She … She didn’t _let_ me stay with Thanos,” he gushes and the name sounds somewhat familiar to her even if Frigga can’t place it right now. “I went to him out of my own free will! You can’t …” His eyes harden. “I’m not gonna go to some shitty fucking asylum in fucking chains! I wanna talk to them. _Now_.”

“Are you sure?” asks Dr. Wilson, his eyebrows hiking up.

“Yes,” snaps Robin.

 _Now_ , _this is going exceptionally well, isn’t it_?

* * *

_Fuck you_.

A giant foul-mouthed fuck-you in big neon letters is all Hela’s mind can manage because she’s lying in another hospital bed, in another town, chained to her bed like a filthy criminal with actual fucking handcuffs this time, and has to listen to _another_ doctor in blue scrubs rubbing her face into her stage-four fucking kidney disease.

“A few months or even weeks is optimistic,” he informs her with zero compassion after she told him what the other doctor said because she’s been arrested for child endangerment and doesn’t deserve an ounce of compassion even if she did the fucking right thing in the end. “I wouldn’t count on that. You need a transplant to live and you need it sooner rather than later.”

 _Fuck_.

 _Fuck everything_.

Hela Davis didn’t endure everything she endured only to die a miserable death now. There has to be a way. If she only wills it, she’ll survive, she thinks when the doctor finally takes his leave. She always did. She made it this far. She doesn’t have to waste away. She doesn’t have to—

And then Detective fucking Coulson strides into her hospital room with a dark-haired woman in tow after letting her stew for an eternity after she’d succumbed to another violent coughing fit in the police station the previous night, spewing her dissolving intestines all over the place until they had mercy on her and sent her to the hospital.

Not that a hospital is the place to be, far from it, but it’s still better than an interrogation room or a fucking jail cell.

“Miss Davis,” Coulson greets her. His face is an unreadable mask but there is a hint of hostility in his voice as he holds up her ID. “Or are you more comfortable with Miss Morrison?”

“Oh please,” Hela scoffs out of sheer reflex. “Don’t make it sound as if I’m living under a fake name or something. My ID is legit. I’ve committed my own share of offenses but living as Elena Morrison isn’t one of them.”

“Oh, I know. I could probably wallpaper my office with your rap sheet. Battery. Assault. Multiple DUIs. Cocaine possession. Prostitution. Vandalism. Disorderly conduct. Auto theft. Breaking and entering. Not to mention the—”

“Are you done?” Hela sighs. “I know what I did, okay? _I_ was the one doing it and I really don’t see the point of you recapping my life for me. I’m neither demented nor stupid.”

“That’s good,” Coulson says. “Then you also know what you did to Loki?”

Something inside of her crumbles or maybe that’s just her kidney quitting. “I guess so.”

Coulson sends her a grim smile. “This is Maria Hill from Child Protective Services,” says he and Hela’s mood instantly darkens into the deepest black. “She is handling Loki’s case and will determine appropriate custody for him after he received psychiatric treatment.”

“I’m not,” Hela begins, not knowing what it is she actually wants to say. “I mean, I don’t want custody, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Okay, she kinda does, _this_ is how much the kid has grown on her, but she’s no longer delusional. “I’m not gonna fight Frigga for custody.”

Maria Hill scribbles something onto an old-fashioned notepad as Coulson switches on a more technologically advanced recording app on an official-looking phone that hasn’t been in vogue yet the last time she got her sorry ass arrested. “Now that we got that out of the way, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? This is Detective Phil Coulson, interviewing Hela Davis on December 24th, 2019, eleven thirty a.m. Present in the room as an observer is Child Services investigator Maria Hill. Miss Davis, you have the right to remain—”

“How many times do I have to tell you that there’s no need to Mirandize me?” Hela cuts in. “I’ve been there before remember? Let’s just get this over with.”

“Do you want a lawyer?”

“Gosh, no.” She chuckles. “I hate lawyers.”

“Alright.” Coulson slaps on a smile that seems at least partly genuine. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

“I made an appointment in Vegas to get a second opinion on my cancer,” Hela starts, leaving out the part where her useless rat-faced LA doctor wouldn’t prescribe her anything stronger than oxy for the pain even though she begged for Dilaudid because Dilaudid works heroine-like wonders when you crush it and shoot it straight into your bloodstream, especially between the toes, that’s a very nice spot, the perfect spot actually, _dammit_ , the contentment you feel after injecting dope there is probably the equivalent of the contentment a relaxed cat feels when you’re giving it a belly rub. She forces herself to focus. “I smoked a cig before going into the hospital and ran into Thor and, uh, we kinda—”

“I meant the very beginning,” Coulson interrupts. “Sixteen years ago.”

Hela’s heart sinks. “You mean when I … got pregnant?”

He nods. “Sure. Let’s start there.”

“My first thought was that I had to get rid of the baby,” Hela whispers and a cold shiver runs through her when she remembers the unspeakable terror submerging her in some filthy bathroom when she realized that the pregnancy test was actually fucking positive. It feels like a million years ago, it feels like yesterday. “There was no way I could have cared for it or anything. I knew that. I’m not dumb.”

Coulson nods.

“But my pimp, he had this one client with shit tons of cash who was turned on by pregnant bellies and I’m not even kidding, there’s a kink for everything and I literally mean _everything_. You can test me on that, if you want.” Another throat-and-chest-rupturing cough builds up inside her throat, making more blood well into her throat. Hela coughs and tries to soak up the blood with a tissue, using the hand that isn’t cuffed to her bed.

Coulson doesn’t even flinch, the bastard.

“Anyway,” says Hela after she wiped her mouth with her sleeve, resigning herself to the realization that she won’t possibly win that cop over in what little remains of her lifetime. “Whenever one of us got pregnant, we had to keep our baby. We tried not to get pregnant, of course, but you know how it is. You earn more if you’re providing your services without a cum catcher.” She chuckles out of sheer reflex. “Problem was I didn’t realize I actually was pregnant until a few weeks in and one of the girls snitched on me, so I really didn’t have a choice. And then I thought, hey, maybe that baby could be my ticket out of there, you know. I thought I could take us to a shelter or something after it’s born. I got off the drugs or tried to, anyway. I thought, ‘Once I have that baby, I’ll get help because I have a baby.’ People love babies. They usually try to protect ‘em.”

“Why didn’t you go to a shelter when you were still pregnant?” Hill asks.

“Because a pregnant whore is still a whore,” Hela mumbles bitterly and she feels the kind of coldness inside her heart that she tried to blanket with the next high when she was younger, always the next high, because the realization that nobody truly cared for her was too much to bear. The anger, the resentment, the despair, the bitterness, the longing, the longing most of all, was just too much to bear.

Even now, after more than sixteen years, it still is.

“I wanted to make sure there was an actual baby to hold that’d trigger people’s, you know, protective instincts,” Hela spits.

Coulson frowns at that for a moment before he asks, “And what then?”

“It was the actual worst nightmare when he came out,” Hela concedes because even if those people are fucking law enforcement, it does feel good to finally be able to unload the shit she’s been carrying around with her for so long onto someone. “He just screamed, like all the time.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what babies do,” Coulson remarks pointedly. “My children did.”

“But he didn’t ever stop,” Hela gasps, all those painful memories that the drugs kept at bay for so long suddenly flooding her mind. She sees herself in some indistinct room, trying to shush that ungrateful, hysterical little bundle, and the whole thing has a really, really unwelcome psycho thriller feel to it. The minute Ri wrapped the kid up in some blanket, the minute she knew she hadn’t lost him, she pushed him out of her mind and recompensed herself with a line longer than the fucking wall of China for having endured the utter miseries of pregnancy. She doesn’t remember ever breastfeeding the kid. She doesn’t even remember feeding him anything at all. She’s the worst fucking person in the world. “I put him down, he cried. I picked him back up, he still cried. Someone fed him, Ri mostly, he cried. Ri rocked him, he cried. He never fucking shut up.”

“Who’s Ri?”

“Who do you think?” Hela bristles. “She was just another whore.”

Coulson sighs. “What then?”

 _What then_ _indeed_.

“Why didn’t you go to a shelter like you wanted to?” asks Hill.

 _Yes, why didn’t she_? _Isn’t that just the fucking question_?


	2. Damn you, brother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hela makes an unexpected confession and Thor meets his one-night stand in daylight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll notice that I changed her name because she wasn't supposed to play a role in this verse but I've been thinking about it and now I want her to because it spices things up a little, so I turned her into a Marvel character. More info in the end notes.

“Because,” Hela begins on a sigh but then falls silent again because whatever she could possibly say sounds fucking outrageous even to her own ears now. _Because I couldn’t even bring myself to fake love for that kid_? _Because the shelter people wouldn’t have tolerated me there if I’d kept using and_ , _surprise_ , _getting high was more important to me than the health of my own child_? Hela can’t possibly say that out loud in front of a Child fucking Services investigator though, right? That’d go down like a lead balloon. With spikes.

“What was your pimp’s name back then?” Coulson asks, probably to bridge the silence.

“He was known as Skurge,” Hela snorts because the name has lost nothing of its ridiculousness over the years. But at least, it’s given her an opening. “He told us to get rid of the girl babies, so we took them to baby hatches but the boys, he usually kept them for himself. Some of them at least,” Hela chokes out. There’s no fucking way she wants to relive this period of her life in her final weeks without dope to help her through remembering the swallowed screams, the pain in her pussy, the dark allies, the disgusting smell of old sweat, the whimpering at night, the biting cold … She could just claim her right to remain fucking silent and go to sleep. And yet …

Maybe that’s what she’s been clinging to. The opportunity to make sense of that fucked-up past.

“So, he took him from you, is what you’re saying?” Coulson arches his brows. “But if that’s the case, how did he end up on Mr. Borson’s doorstep?”

“He didn’t want _this_ particular baby boy because Loki was screaming his ass off all the time. He said he was worse than a girl baby and he was, _he_ _really fucking was_ , so, uh, after a few days, he told me to get rid of him too,” Hela says, her voice crumbling to a whisper. “He gave me his car and he said I’d better return without the kid.”

“But you didn’t use this opportunity to escape to a shelter,” Maria Hill points out the fucking obvious.

“I thought about it,” Hela lies because, in reality, she was already thinking about how much cash she’d need to make it through the night. “But I worked a job on the way and—”

“What kind of job?” Coulson asks.

 _Condescending prick_. “I sucked a guy’s dick for money,” Hela snarls nastily. “I made him fucking come inside my mouth. Do you need more visuals?”

Coulson has the good graces to look at least slightly ashamed. “I think I’m good.”

“I left the baby in the car,” Hela concedes in a whisper, to which Maria Hill scrunches up her perfect nose. “I don’t know for how long. I don’t think it was actually that long because when you suck some weird ass guy’s cock in a hotel room, it can feel like three hours even though only fifteen minutes passed but when I came back, the baby was silent. I thought it was dead and I knew I had to get rid of it and …” Her voice trails off. _Here comes the tricky part_.

“Well, we all know what happened, don’t we?” Coulson asks and he very much looks as if he’ll spit in her face any moment now. “You wrapped the baby up in a blanket, placed it on your former stepfather’s doorstep and left a note that said, ‘I hope you enjoy your gift’.” Yeah, that was probably unnecessarily cruel and childish and awfully self-righteous, Hela can kinda see that now. “All we need to know is why. Why would you …” He gestures the rest because there are no words for what she did that day. Not a single fucking syllable.

“I got mad at everything and everyone,” Hela tries anyway because she has to say something. “I was zonked and I got mad at myself and my pimp and the world and I got really, really, _really_ mad at this family for pushing me into a situation in which I had to get rid of a dead baby. Which is why I figured that they should be the ones to get rid of it because it was basically their fault. If they hadn’t thrown me out ...” Hela’s words trail off once more as her thoughts transport her back to a time when she seriously hoped that she could live with Frigga as her Mom because Frigga was amazing back in the day and her hugs were life-changing and she made you feel like you really matter.

Until she showed her true face.

They both stare at her, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed, waiting for more.

“Look, I’m not trying to get your sympathy here or whatever,” Hela snaps even though maybe she is. She deserves a bit of sympathy, doesn’t she? _Ha_ , _no_. She’s the absolute worst. She almost killed her own child twice and _then_ she let him stay with Thanos who choked him and starved him and stuffed him full of dope. “I’m not trying to make excuses either. I’m not proud of what I did”—there’s literally nothing to be proud of in her entire miserable excuse of a sorry ass life—“but that’s what happened. I was sixteen and pissed and I got carried away. That’s it.”

There’s a finality to her words that plunges the room into silence for a moment, which Maria Hill uses to scribble merrily onto her little notepad.

“And then what?” Coulson asks before the silence can get too crushing or too awkward. 

“I returned the car and, uh, picked up where I left off,” says Hela.

“Just like that?” Coulson asks, his tone dripping with content.

“Just like that.” Although, of course, it wasn’t _just like that_. It never was. That’s what Hela needed the drugs for.

“Until you moved to LA,” Coulson remarks.

“Yeah.” 

“And you were under the impression that the baby was dead this entire time?” Coulson asks.

“Yes.”

“Until you met Thor Odinson on the parking lot of Summerlin Hospital in late September?”

“Yes.”

“So, what happened then?”

Hela recaps her encounter with Thor and the subsequent doctor’s appointment for them, which led her to drive to the house to ask Frigga what really happened to her baby. “I thought the baby had died but I couldn’t be really sure. Maybe it had pulled through after all? Like, much of that period of my life is kind of a blur and my memories aren’t always, uh, reliable, I guess. So, I went there and I saw that kid on the passenger seat and he had black hair and pale skin and I figured I might be lucky.” Another cough works its way up all the way from her hurting organs into her shredded, aching throat and, this time, she has to gag.

It’s pathetic and embarrassing and infuriating and Hela presses the morphine button without thinking twice about it. At least the doctors here care more about keeping her pain at bay than they do about administering drugs. _Yay_!

“And then you thought, ‘Hey, if my baby is alive, he can give me his tissue and his kidney’?” Coulson prompts her, a glint in his narrowed eyes.

“I really don’t know why everyone is making this sound like this huge, awfully selfish thing.” Hela laughs and more bubbles of blood spray from her mouth. Okay, maybe it was kinda selfish because she barged into her kid’s life, shook him up, probably made his mental issues worse and then left him to his own devices with a monster like Thanos. But that’s entirely beside the point right now. “Of course that’s what I thought. That’s what _you_ would’ve thought of right away, I’m sure. I mean, who the fuck wouldn’t?”

“So you went there.”

“Yes, I went there, which, I’m pretty sure, you already know, you fucking sonofabitch,” Hela hisses before she can stop herself. “Sorry,” she pants, trying to calm herself down.

“Do you maybe need a break?” Maria Hill asks.

 _Hell_ , _yes please_. “No, I want to get this over with.” _I want to go to sleep_. “So, the first thing I saw when I laid eyes on him was the huge ass shiner on Loki’s face. It was a real nasty bruise, covering his whole eye.” She indicates the scope with her fingers, trying very hard to forget that she almost choked him to death with her bare hands because he flushed her dope down the toilet. _Pathetic_. _So fucking pathetic_. _You’re the worst fucking hypocrite_ , _you fucking cunt_. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, maybe this wasn’t the ideal family for him to grow up in after all’, you know. I mean, not that I left him there to give him a family to grow up in but once I saw he was living there, I thought I might have done him a favor but then I really saw him and I was like, ‘nope’.”

Coulson nods and Maria Hill scribbles like a world champion.

“That black eye gave me second thoughts about Odin and wanting to live with them because, who the hell knows, he might have started roughing me up too if I’d stayed with them. Turns out it was actually Thor who did that to Loki but still. Odin is an asshole and Frigga is his accomplice. He wasn’t safe there, is what I thought.” Well, whatever passes for thinking when you’re fucked-up on oxy.

Coulson looks genuinely surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry? Are you saying he was safe with you? He—”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Hela bristles. “I’m just telling you what my first impression was.”

He lets it go. For now. “What was your impression when you first talked to Loki?”

“He was fucking holding hands with his big brother.” Hela chuckles incredulously because she still can’t make sense of this weird quirk of his. “He acted like a whole ass child. I’m not even kidding. He was holding his brother’s hand and he stared at me and told me that my hair looked funny. Eventually, he kinda came around though but when he did, he lost his shit. He drank wine straight from the bottle and then he went all hysterical, like, ‘Y’all messed me up! I hate your guts!’ and ‘I hope your cancer kills you real slow and I hope they’ll run out of morphine while it does!’ He stomped out and I left my number in case he changed his mind. I didn’t think he would but, just in case, you know. The whole fucking leave-no-stones-unturned crap.” Hela giggles because she finally ran out of stones to turn.

“And then what?”

“I was smoking a cigarette,” says Hela because that fuckhead doesn’t need to know that she was chewing on a spliff to kill her oxy high so that she could drive back home and didn’t have to spend one more night in a fucking Vegas motel to be reminded of her filthy past. “The kid came out after a while and he said, ‘Do you still want my help? Well, I’ll get my tissue tested if you get me out of here.’ Which is what I did. Well, technically, he did, because he drove the car.”

Her thoughts take her back to that night. “He told me that Thor had abused him and that he’d just defended himself and there were police cars and an ambulance passing us as we drove out of the neighborhood. And I’m not kidding you, _he_ was fucking driving. He made that choice. I fell asleep and he drove us all the way to LA and, when we arrived, he said he wanted to stay with me. Well, I let him because he said he’d get his tissue tested.”

Coulson nods. “And what then?”

“Nothing. He lived with me. It turned out his tissue wasn’t a match, so I said he could stay with me if he helped me drawing tattoos for my clients, which he did. I swear, I wasn’t holding him against his will or anything. He didn’t want to go back. He wanted to stay. Wanted to drink and smoke and just be away from his abusive family, so I let him live with me.”

Coulson narrows his eyes at her and she bursts out into a cackle. “You don’t believe me,” she gasps. “Of course you don’t because I’m nothing but a pathetic addict whore in your eyes but I swear, this kid didn’t want to go back home because his brother abused him. He wanted to stay with me. I didn’t abduct him or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She cackles again. “Of course that’s what you’re thinking but, I swear, if anything, he abducted me and if you get your damn traffic cams to work, you’ll see. He did not want to go back. He—”

“And you thought that this was a good idea?”

Hela blows out a breath. “Who cares what I think?” They obviously don’t. They never did.

“I honestly do care what you think.” Coulson raises his eyebrows at her in the condescending way cops always do when they look at whores slash addicts. “You just said that his family was being abusive, yes? What would you call what happened to him in LA? You just told me you let him drink under your watch. We found traces of drugs in his system too. He’s barely sixteen years old!”

“He was acting a lot older,” Hela mumbles even though she knows it’s a poor defense.

“That won’t help you. I get it. Life has treated you very poorly and I’m sorry about that, I truly am, but you let this boy live with you. You exposed him to drugs, let him abuse those drugs, let him abuse alcohol and then entrusted him to the ‘care’ of someone who gave him more drugs and starved him, strangled him, tied him up, burned and branded him after—”

“Stop,” Hela pleads softly because the images flooding her mind are too horrible to process. She thinks of Loki in that house, his fragile, delicate frame chained to some bed while Thanos and others just take what they want and, _fuck_ , he’s so skinny and imagining a colossus like Thanos on top of him, choking him—

“—after you had a psychotic break. Yes, we did our research this time,” Coulson absolutely has to add with a smug grin on his face when her features slip. “He had to call nine-one-one for you. And then he suffered all that after you went to rehab. He’s your son, for God’s sake. Your own flesh and blood. Doesn’t it make you sick to your stomach, to think he could have been raped and severely beaten to the point where he just resigned himself to a life like this and completely blocked out the life you tore him away from? The life you just went out of your way to paint as ‘abusive’?”

Hela gulps.

“Doesn’t it make you sick to your stomach that you let him endure that despite the knowledge of horrible it feels to be abused as a helpless teenager?”

It does. _It fucking does_.

It brings tears of fury and hopelessness and shame to her eyes.

“We’re not talking child neglect or child endangerment here, Miss Davis. We’re talking child abuse,” Coulson rumbles, making her feel like the fucking maggot that she is. “And complicity to child abuse.”

“I killed him,” Hela blurts out, the truth spluttering out of her just like that, like the blood gushing from Thanos’s throat and the tears sloshing out of her eyes.

“Excuse me?” The cop’s eyes go wide.

* * *

Meanwhile, Thor walks through the doors of the breakfast diner, stepping onto the parking lot and into an icy gust of wind. “And what now?”

“Nothing. It was really good to see you again,” Val chuckles against Thor’s cheek as she brushes a soft good-bye kiss onto his skin. “You’re the first and possibly last vacation acquaintance I’ll actually be thinking about every now and then.”

“Thank you, I guess?” Thor replies, scratching the back of his head. He feels awkward and a little rusty—three months can feel like an eternity sometimes—even though he has absolutely no reason to. She texted him shortly after he left the hospital this morning and he spontaneously asked her out for breakfast. They agreed instantly that their Sunday night encounter was nothing more than a one-night stand and that they’d just share this meal together. They clicked instantly. Well, technically, they’d already kinda clicked in the casino but drunk-clicking usually needs to be reevaluated in sobriety. Their conversation was easy-going, the type of conversation that deludes you into thinking you’ve known the other person for ages.

“Why are you so jittery?” Val asks, wrinkling her cute nose. Damn, she’s really lovely with her brown skin and her dark eyes and her shiny white teeth. She’s from the same part of Norway as his family, she’s a kickboxing trainer who dropped out of High School and has been living on her own since she was fifteen, she’s badass and no-nonsense and incredibly witty and, despite their earlier agreement, Thor wants to kiss her again. Badly. Which is incredibly stupid because she’s gonna board a plane in a few days. She has a fucking life and a job halfway across the world and this can’t happen, this can’t be anything, they can’t be—

Thor leans in, tucks one of her dreads behind her ear and then pulls her in for a kiss, softly parting her full lips with his tongue. She kisses him back, still tasting like maple syrup and coffee, and when his tongue brushes over her teeth, a wave of blood rushes to his dick. _Dammit._ He almost fucking moans when she grabs his ass in both of her hands.

“Well, I guess there’s nothing preventing us from going back on our word, right?” Val asks cheekily, her lips an inch from his. “I have a suite.”

“I, uh,” Thor stammers as he releases her. He feels like an asshole but his mother is probably wondering why the hell he’s taking thirty million years to pack some clothes and a few toiletries and if he’ll take any more time … “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Val narrows her eyes at him, a brief spark flashing through them. “Seriously, Thor, what the hell are you messing with me like that for?”

“My brother, he’s in the hospital,” Thor blurts out, then swallows. He hasn’t mentioned Loki apart from the fact that he _has_ a little brother and that their relationship is rather complicated and he has no clue how to deal with any of this because, _fuck_ , he’s crushing on her real bad but Loki just got back and he’ll need him and she lives almost six-thousand miles away anyway and why did he even text her in the first place? Why didn’t he just let a one-night stand be a one-night stand? Why didn’t he just move the fuck on with his life like a normal person? Oh, Dr. Fowley will have a fucking field day with this, he’s sure of it.

Her lips form a perfect oval. “What happened?”

“He’s, uh, not well actually,” Thor mumbles, which has to be the understatement of the fucking century. “Mentally. He just returned from …” Los Angeles where he lived with drug addicts and sadists who tortured him. _Yeah no_. _Not the right topic for a first date_ , _which wasn’t even supposed to be one_. Why didn’t he just lie, for fuck’s sake? “Anyway, I was supposed to get him a few things and my mother is probably wondering why I’m taking so long, so, uh, I should get going. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes flicker. “I understand.”

 _Oh no_ , _you don’t_ , thinks Thor. No one ever understands. “I’ll text you, okay?” he tries. _Fuck_. _What the hell are you doing_ , _you fucking moron_? _Just think_. “Maybe we can do something later or tomorrow?”

“I said I understand,” purrs Val and his heart sinks. “It was nice to meet you, it really was. You’re a handsome guy, the sex was amazing and you’re one hell of a kisser but I usually stay clear of people with too much, uh, emotional baggage.”

 _No_. _Please no_.

 _Not **again**_.

“Listen,” Thor cuts in. “I-I didn’t mean it like this, okay? Maybe you can come with me? I mean, not into the hospital of course”— _the fucking psych ward_ —“but just to drop off Loki’s things? I’ll just pop in real quick”— _yeah_ , _riiiiiight_ —“and then we can, uh, check out that suite of yours? How does that sound?”

“You aren’t a very good at this, I’m afraid.” Val chuckles and Thor curses himself because he used to pretty damn good at this.

“It’s alright. We both now I’ll be leaving in four days anyway and I wanna have fun while I’m here, okay? Good bye, Thor.” She stands up on her tiptoes to brush one last kiss onto his cheek before she turns around with a smile, leaving him to his own devices.

 _Hell_ , _fucking_ _no_.

 _Dammit_.

Thor doesn’t want to think it because he isn’t that person anymore and none of this is Loki’s fault but he does think it anyway.

 _Damn you_ , _brother_.

* * *

“The guy who did this to Loki, I killed him,” Hela snivels, wiping her eyes and nose. Now that the last of her secrets is out, she feels an eerie calmness wash over her. Maybe there is an incredible kind of freedom in having nothing left to lose after all. “His name is Thanos. They call him Titan on the street because he’s six feet ten. He’s a drug lord, a child trafficker and a child porn dealer.”

“A what?” Maria Hill looks as if she’s suddenly faced with another version of herself from a parallel universe. Coulson just stares.

“When I met him a few years ago,” Hela continues because she suddenly feels this burning need to get it all out, “we started out as a regular couple, whatever the hell _that_ means these days, but then he got whiff of me being an addict after a while and it all went downhill from there. And before you ask, _yes_ , I was aware of what he was doing, I even helped him, which, _yes_ , I know, adds complicity to child pornography and child prostitution to my rap sheet. I was a horrible fucking horrible person and there’s nothing I can do to undo the past but I’ll give you everything about Thanos that I know, I promise. Everything, whatever you want, but you have to believe me, I didn’t entrust Loki to his care. I told him to stay the fuck away from him. Thanos told me he’d snapped some photos of Loki even though I told him he was off limits. I told him to fuck off. I tried to get clean…er. But then Loki was acting crazy again and I had a psychotic break and I ended up in the hospital and Loki ran away. That’s the last time I saw him. Thanos must have picked him up somewhere or maybe Loki went to see him, I don’t know. I overdosed, I mean, not deadly, but badly enough to be needing detox, which, as you know, led to court-ordered rehab and—”

“You got clean but still didn’t pick up the phone to call Miss Fjörgyndottir or the police or Child Services, not even anonymously, to tip them off about your missing boy?” Hill asks, her eyebrows hiking all the way up towards her hairline.

“That’s the story of my life,” Hela snorts, a desperate laugh escaping through her lips. “I just love to fuck things up for myself and everyone else.”

“This isn’t funny,” snaps Hill.

 _No_ , _it’s not_. It’s fucking terrible and now she’s fucking dying and she’ll never make it right. “All I can tell you is that I wanted to set it right myself and that I came for Loki as soon as I got out. I broke up with Thanos and he raped me in return and then I killed him because he wanted to rape Loki too, to show me who’s in charge. I don’t know if you can call that self-defense but, in that moment, I just thought about everything he’d done and I just … pulled the trigger. I don’t even remember making that decision but I’m glad I did because he won’t ever get a chance to hurt anyone else.”

There is silence after that.

“That’s all I got,” Hela whispers, her voice trembling. “That, and I made sure to keep his DNA, for whatever it’s worth. I swabbed my cheeks because he was furious enough to jerk off into my face to show me what a whore I am, the dumbass. The tissues are in my purse. You’re free to take ‘em. Maybe they’ll help you solve a few cold cases or something.”

Coulson finally looks ashamed as he glances at her bag. “We, uh, will. Thank you.” He harrumphs. “Did Loki tell you anything about what happened to him?”

“He was far too plastered to tell me much of anything.” Hela sighs, then coughs, then remembers that they’ve been sitting her for at least an hour and she didn’t even ask them about the kid’s mental and physical state. _Fuck_. “How is he? Is he okay?”

“What do _you_ think?” Coulson asks sourly. “He completely freaked out just because I put a hand on his back and then he harmed himself. He’s in the psych ward now.”

Maria Hill’s phone buzzes and she answers immediately. “We’ll be over in a bit,” she says after a short moment. “Thank you, Dr. Wilson.”

“Speaking of the devil,” murmurs Coulson as Hill ends the call, focusing Hela with a glint in her eyes. “Your son is awake now.”

Hela gulps.

“And he wants to talk.”

 _Holy fucking shit_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok sooo, she's from Norway and not from Austria (and Thor does know where THAT is, lol) and she left the burning flame emoji instead of a heart emoji in his phone because she's feisty not smoochy. Minor details but I quickly changed the respective paragraphs in Aftermath. So, why did I want her to play a role, you ask? Well, Thor has always been quite involved with girls prior to the events of Breaking Point and him being single/having no romantic or sexual interest for almost the entire time of the prequels isn't quite how things usually are and if he has to learn how to balance his relationship with Loki during his brother's and the family's recovery process, why not learn to do so under real-life conditions instead of having to sort of readjust later?
> 
> Well, let's see how it plays out, shall we?


	3. A sorry ass pile of broken pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coulson and Hill question Robin and, to use Frigga's words, it's going as splendidly as expected.

Frigga is sitting outside in the waiting area with Dr. Wilson when Thor arrives at the hospital, a dismal expression stamped across her face that happens to perfectly mirror his own mental state. “Let me guess,” he rumbles as he throws the duffel bag with his brother’s things onto the chair next to his mother. “He woke up as Robin and still doesn’t remember who we are?” _Meaning I’m here for fucking nothing_? _Is that what your expression is supposed to tell me_ , _dearest mother_?

Okay, breathe. Just breathe. It’s not her fault and it’s not Loki’s fault. The universe just has a cruel sense of humor where their family is concerned.

“Worse,” sighs Frigga. “He wants to talk to the police, to witness for Hela. He said he wanted to go back to live with her.”

 _Just when he thought that his day couldn’t possibly get any crappier_. “Doesn’t matter what he says,” Thor huffs. “She’ll never get custody after hurting him like that.”

“That’d be a miracle,” Dr. Wilson agrees.

Frigga’s expression is pain incarnate. “And yet he said she never hurt him.”

 _What the freaking fuck_?

“She might not have hurt _him_ but that doesn’t mean she didn’t hurt Loki or Leah or even Nikias,” Thor storms, all his breathing exercises momentarily forgotten. “His statement is only half the truth, maybe not even that.”

“I know, honey.” Frigga looks so fucking miserable and she shouldn’t have to, _she damn well shouldn’t have to look so fucking miserable anymore_ , because now that his brother is back, things should be getting slowly better and not steadily worse.

“Damn her,” Thor barks, instantly victimized by his temper when he imagines all the dreadful, filthy, demeaning, abusive horrors Loki had to endure because of that cold-blooded bitch. “She’ll probably get sympathy points because she’s dying and because she was abused as a kid and even if she weren’t sick, if they only question Robin without an expert to testify to the necessity of interrogating all of Loki’s alters, she’ll get away with what she did to them. We can’t get a conviction either way. This is not right!”

Frigga actually fucking beams at him. “You’re sounding like a prosecutor.”

“Maybe law school wasn’t a total waste,” Thor snorts. “Maybe I’ll drop my football career and start working for the DA’s office to make sure to sentence as many scumbags as I can to prevent them from hurting vulnerable teenagers out on the streets!”

This is ridiculous, of course it is, he’d miss football like crazy and he’d never have the patience to suffer through a trial where you have to compose yourself at all times—not to mention that he’d have to take on his own father in court if he started working for the District Attorney, ha!—but, then again, it’s one of these thoughts that’ll probably take root in his brain anyway. And since he never thought about what he’d do if he won’t make the NFL because he isn’t the plan B type of guy … _No_ , _stop it right there_. _Focus_. _Just fucking focus_.

“I didn’t know anyone was trying to get a conviction in the first place,” admits Dr. Wilson, reminding Thor of a fucking puppy. “From what I’ve gathered, the interrogations serve the primary purpose of determining appropriate custody, at least for now.”

“They do,” says Frigga, looking vaguely apologetic. “My son, he’s just, uh, overshooting the mark sometimes.”

Thor glares at her. “At least one of us does because what she did was unforgivable and you’re like—”

“What am I like, huh?” Frigga cuts in.

“Like she already boiled you soft,” Thor replies, uncomfortably aware of Dr. Wilson’s gaze on them.

“Hela will not receive custody after everything that happened and that’s enough for me,” says his mother. “She brought him back, after all. And she suffered a lot in her life and there’s no need to put her on trial while she’s succumbing to a terminal illness. That’d be downright cruel, don’t you think?”

 _There you go_. “Loki suffered a lot in his life as well and seventy-five percent of his issues are her fault. I don’t give a flying fuck that she’s dying! Loki could have died because of her, Mom. There is no excuse for her behavior,” Thor snaps before turning to Dr. Wilson. “You’ll tell them, right? That Robin’s statement is only one of at least four that’d be needed to get the full picture?”

The doctor needs a moment to reply and before he does, he harrumphs awkwardly. “Your brother hasn’t been officially diagnosed yet and I’m no expert on DID. I only just met Loki. He was admitted because he suffered a drug-induced mental break and engaged in self-harming behaviors.”

 _Great_. _Fucking great_. The self-proclaimed PTSD specialist has no fucking clue and Thor begins to suspect that his Mom’s desperate clinging to the idea of Dr. van Dyne as Loki’s therapist is valid after all because no other licensed shrink he met so far seems to have any fucking idea what the hell is actually going on in his little brother’s traumatized brain. “A drug-induced mental break?” Thor grinds out. “Is that what you’re going with? His therapist said—”

“His therapist didn’t render her opinion in writing and, as you’ve told me, she only saw him _once_ a few months ago,” Dr. Wilson cuts in, silencing Thor with his hand when he starts to protest. “DID is a very complex, hopelessly under-researched, often-overlooked condition that most therapists wouldn’t even recognize if it bit them in the butt and you’re trying to tell me that she detected it in a single session? The chances for that are one in a billion, Mr. Odinson. Do your research.”

“ _Do my research_?” Thor thunders. “I did my fucking research. I was stabbed by one of my brother’s alters who wasn’t Loki because Loki would never do this to me! I spent time with him after he switched to a goddamn toddler! You’re just a—”

“Thor, please.” Frigga has risen to her feet and is frantically tugging at his arm because people have started to glance in their direction. “Lower your voice.”

“Just fucking call Dr. van Dyne,” Thor spits. “She’ll tell you.”

Before Dr. Wilson can reply, his pager goes off and he excuses himself.

“This is ridiculous,” Thor huffs. “What good will this place fucking do my brother if they don’t even see the real problem? They’re fucking amateurs!”

“He won’t stay here for long, honey,” Frigga sighs. “It’s just temporary. He’ll receive better care soon.”

 _Yeah_ , _in fucking Arizona if you’ll have your way_ , Thor thinks but doesn’t say because it’s uncalled for. He knows it is but that doesn’t mean he can’t still be angry. He blows out a furious breath.

“What’s wrong? I mean, apart from all of this,” Frigga asks, her accursed motherly antennae picking up the one frequency of his distress that has nothing to do with Loki. “Where have you been? I mean, not that I,” she hurries to add when she apparently realizes how harsh the question sounded. “I mean, uh, you probably just took a breather and that’s fine. I just thought you’d come back—”

“I kinda went out on a date,” Thor blurts out and then slumps into one of the chairs opposite his Mom, his cheeks flushing hot.

“A date?” Frigga echoes.

“It wasn’t a real date,” Thor clarifies hastily. “I met this tourist when I was out with the guys and we exchanged numbers and, uh, she asked me, well, I asked her if she wanted to hook up again and, shortly after I left this morning, she texted me and—”

His mother interrupts him by holding up her hand. “It’s fine. You don’t have to justify yourself to me. I was just … surprised, that’s all.”

“No, it’s not,” Thor grumbles. “I can see it in your face. But it doesn’t matter anyway because she’s gonna fly back to Europe before New Year’s anyway. It’s nothing remotely serious. It was just …” His words get lost in a guttural sigh because there are no words to describe what the hell this morning was. All he knows is that the thought of Val leaving makes his intestines clench up and that it’d only frustrate him more if he talked to Loki right now because Loki has become Robin and Robin doesn’t remember Thor and it’s fucking Christmas Eve. They should all be home together right now, preparing food for tomorrow and humming along to the same lame ass carols they hum along to every year.

It’s just not fair.

It’s _so_ not fair

“I don’t wanna talk about it, okay? Let’s just not … talk while we wait for the cops, okay?”

* * *

They don’t have to wait long. Not ten minutes after Thor’s directive, Detective Phil Coulson and Maria Hill march into the waiting room area side by side, their steps perfectly in sync, and finally disperse the silence that has settled between Frigga and her son.

“Loki is still convinced that his name is Robin at this point,” Dr. Wilson informs the investigators after the mandatory greetings and handshakes are behind them. “He told us that he wanted to talk to you in particular, Mrs. Hill, because, in his current state, he uttered the wish to go back and live with his birthmother.”

Maria Hill nods.

“I’d strongly advise you not to ask questions about what Loki did to his brother,” Dr. Wilson continues, “for he seems to have no recollection of those events at the moment and if you proceed in that direction, you’ll only upset him and I can’t allow that.”

“Understood,” says Coulson.

“Oh, and more thing,” Dr. Wilson says as they all set themselves in motion. “Loki doesn’t remember his family at all, which is why you, Mr. Odinson, will have to stay outside.”

“Is that a joke?” Thor’s eyes narrow and then flit towards Frigga. “I mean, I get it, he doesn’t remember us but why can she go and I can’t?”

“Well, your mother told him that Hela appointed her as his guardian in case anything ever happened to her,” Dr. Wilson replies. “And he believed it. Which is why we’re—”

“Oh, wow,” Thor cuts in, his face darker than a thundercloud. “Thanks for not bringing _that_ up while we were alone, Mom.”

“It was nothing but a white lie, honey,” Frigga defends herself. “It came to me out of nowhere when your brother asked me who I was and I didn’t think it’d have any further consequences and you … you told me not to talk, so I didn’t.” It’s a poor excuse and she knows it.

“You can’t be that _dense_ , Mom!” Thor explodes. “I just didn’t wanna talk about _me_ , for fuck’s sake! Did you really think I wouldn’t want to know what’s going on with—”

“Hey,” Coulson cuts her son off, his face a grim mask as he places a firm hand on Thor’s shoulder, squeezing it firmly. “You wait out here and put the lid back on that temper of yours. Did I make myself clear?”

Thor draws a deep breath.

“We’ll keep the door ajar so you can listen in and I promise you we’ll tread carefully with your brother, alright?” Coulson offers. “But you’re in too much of a fluster to go in there.”

“I’m sure you’ll understand our concerns, Mr. Odinson,” Dr. Wilson adds. “I’m also sure you want what’s best for your brother and you barging in there right now might not be what’s best for him if he has no knowledge of your existence. Just allow yourself a moment to think about that.”

He does and every nerve in his muscular frame is trembling as he tries to compose himself. “Alright,” Thor concedes eventually even if he looks far from pleased. “I’ll be out here if you need me.”

They all nod their agreement and then walk into Loki’s—Robin’s—hospital room. Her afflicted boy is still in four-points but he tries to prop himself up as best as he can anyway, as always eager to preserve his dignity.

“Hi. My name is Phil Coulson,” begins the detective as he shows Robin his badge. “I’m with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and this is Maria Hill from Child Protective Services. How are you feeling?”

Robin’s eyes narrow. “Why has a Vegas cop come to question me?”

“Because you’re on Vegas turf right now.” Coulson shrugs his apologies. “I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me for the time being.”

Robin narrows his eyes at the detective and Frigga can almost see his mind working feverishly behind his forehead. “I see,” he faintly agrees at last and it drives her almost insane that she can’t give him comfort just yet. Just as Thor has been condemned to wait outside, she’s been condemned to not be able to hug him at this point.

“You’ve wanted to talk to us?” Hill takes over.

“Yes,” Robin says, his voice still so awfully weak. “I wanted to talk about my mother.”

“I’ll record this conversation if that’s alright with you,” Coulson interjects, pulling out his phone and turning it in his hands. “Your legal guardian is here as your advisor but if you want a lawyer present instead, we’ll—”

“She is a lawyer though, isn’t she?” Robin says, reminding Frigga that Loki is still in there and that he hasn’t forgotten his life entirely. She fights the urge to spring forward and shower him with kisses.

“Is she?” Coulson enquires. “I was under the impression she was managing a law firm?”

“What difference does _that_ make?” Robin asks thinly. “Lawyers are lawyers. Just press play on that damn app of yours and let’s just get this over with.”

Coulson clears his throat and then presses a red button on his phone. “I was just making sure that you are aware of your right to talk to—”

“A lawyer for advice before you ask me any questions,” Robin finishes. “Yes, I know. But you aren’t questioning me because I’m a suspect in some criminal investigation, so why would I even need a lawyer in the first place? I really just want to talk to CPS about how you people just decided I’d have to go to treatment instead of going home with my Mom.” He glares at Hill. “So? Talk. Ask. Fire away. Whatever it is you do.”

“Before we start,” Coulson intervenes, “I need to ask you a few basic questions to determine your current state of mind, okay?”

“As if I could refuse,” Robin sneers, eliciting an appreciative smile from the detective. “Just go ahead if you must.”

“I need your full name for the protocol.”

“Robin Morrison,” he says and Frigga can practically feel Thor tense up even though he’s standing a few feet away on the other side of a goddamn wall.

“What’s your mother’s name?”

“Elena Morrison.” He harrumphs. “Her official name, anyway. Her birth name is Hela Davis.”

“What’s your father’s name?”

“I don’t know him, never did,” Robin says bitterly.

“What is your date of birth?”

“October 27th, 2003,” Robin says, obviously having discarded the birthday they celebrated with him for years. It shouldn’t hurt or surprise Frigga as much as it does.

“Where do you currently live?”

“1316 W 4th Street, Los Angeles.”

“So, how did you guys end up in Vegas last night? Why did your mother bring you here?”

“Well, I guess, I didn’t know how sick she really was,” Robin replies softly, which really isn’t an answer yet. He flicks a shy glance in Frigga’s direction. “My Mom never even told me I had a guardian in case anything happened to her.”

Coulson nods. “But she told you that last night?”

“No, Frigga told me that this morning,” says Robin, suddenly looking as if his child alter is going to front any moment. His eyelids begin to twitch and she focuses her attention on Dr. Wilson to see how he’ll react if Robin switches.

“And you believe her?” asks Coulson.

“Why would she lie to me?” Robin asks, then cackles thinly. “Okay, that’s a stupid question. People lie all the time but what would we be doing in Vegas if it wasn’t true? We’ve never been to Vegas before.”

“Really? Even though your mother was born and raised here?” Coulson treads carefully and Robin’s composure begins to slip a little because he probably remembers too little to create a coherent narrative encompassing all sixteen years of his life. Frigga tries to swallow the lump forming in her throat. “You never visited your grandparents or—”

Robin shakes his head and draws a shaky breath. “I don’t have any grandparents.”

“So, just to be clear here, you don’t remember ever living in this city,” Coulson asks but it doesn’t sound like a question. “You don’t remember the house on 9273 Tournament Canyon Drive?"

Robin shakes his head.

“What about last night?” asks Coulson. “Do you remember last night?”

“Not really, no. I was sort of,” he harrumphs, then chuckles, “cognitively incapacitated.”

“Alright then,” he says and hands over the reins to Maria Hill, who begins with, “Before we start, I want to make sure you understand what my job is.”

“Your job?” Robin echoes incredulously. “You’re a CPS investigator. You work for the state to provide protection for abused and neglected children.”

“Precisely,” Hill says, looking slightly out of her depth and Frigga can’t blame her. “And, as you probably know, we have the legal authority to take children out of their homes. If a report is made and we determine that a child is in danger, we have the right to remove them from that situation and any unsafe environment.”

“The only problem is that I’m not a child anymore,” Robin snaps in a fluster. “I’m sixteen. If I’m not mistaken, the developmental stage I am currently in would be considered that of a teenager.”

“But you’re still considered a minor in all fifty states,” counters Hill, making Robin bristle. “We don’t distinguish between—”

“Then you should probably rename your particular branch of social services Child and Teenage Protective Services,” he grumbles. “You know, to avoid confusion.”

Maria Hill smiles at him, which only seems to make him angrier. “So, who reported my Mom?”

Coulson and Hill exchange a quick glance and Frigga swallows again.

“I did,” Dr. Wilson lies.

“Why?”

“Because you have been very obviously physically abused and didn’t have an adult in your life to protect you from the harm that was done to you,” the psychiatrist answers smoothly and Frigga supposes that Thor is boiling over with rage outside by now.

“But that wasn’t my mother who did this to me,” Robin insists. “I told you that.”

“Hela told us that it was Thanos who abused you, is that correct?” Coulson takes over.

Robin shrugs.

“Was he also the one who gave you the drugs or did you get them from your mother?”

“I stole the pills from one of the girls,” Robin sighs. “But, to be perfectly honest, I still don’t understand why you are here, sir. I am not a suspect, am I?”

“No.”

“Then why on earth are you here?”

Coulson draws a breath.

“I mean, since you’ve been so concerned about my understanding of your jobs earlier, I thought that _your_ primary objective as a member of the Las Vegas police force is to arrest and detain individuals who are accused of breaking the law but, then again, you just said I’m no such individual. And neither do I wish to press charges against anyone. I mean, I am well aware that you can encourage the prosecution to file charges anyway, no matter what I say, but let’s be realistic here for a second, yes? If I don’t cooperate, your chances of getting a conviction are ridiculously low, aren’t they?” He chuckles thinly. “Isn’t a victim’s refusal to press charges often the reason prosecutors won’t pull through with it?”

Coulson and Hill exchange a quick glance infested with meaning all the same.

“Apart from that, I don’t recall you introducing yourself as a federal agent,” Robin bristles and Frigga can’t help but see him carrying on his adoptive father’s lifework once more. “Whatever happened in LA, happened three-hundred miles out of your jurisdiction. You’re not FBI and if you can’t give me a reasonable explanation why LVMPD is questioning me about things that occurred in another state, I’ll have to ask you to leave my room.”

That sends Coulson struggling for a beat and Frigga draws in a deep breath. _This is going as splendidly as expected_ , _isn’t it_?

“There are things you don’t remember because of the traumas you experienced,” Dr. Wilson steps in cautiously. “There are reasons why the Las Vegas police is questioning you but if we told you, you probably wouldn’t believe us because of the dissociative episodes you’ve been going through and the amnesic walls you’ve erected around some of your memories to protect yourself. We don’t want to upset you by telling you something that wouldn’t make sense to you right now.”

Robin closes his eyes as he ponders this and, for a moment, Frigga is convinced that he’ll be drifting off into sleep. Gosh, he must be so exhausted and in such pain. She wants to hug him so badly it’s almost tearing her heart to pieces. “What things?” he asks eventually, his voice thin.

“Things about your family.”

“I don’t have a family,” Robin mumbles, thrusting a knife into Frigga’s heart. “I have Hela.” _Wait_ , _what was that_? _He didn’t call her Hela before_ , _did he_? _Is this someone else talking now_? “She’s all I have and I’m all she has and you can’t just take that away from us!”

“She let you stay with a man who inflicted all this pain on you,” Coulson tries again, aghast. “We questioned her before we came here. She confessed to complicity to child abuse, complicity to child pornography, complicity to child prostitution and manslaughter.”

“What?” Robin and Frigga ask in unison and her entire being revolts against the implications of what was just said. Pornography. Prostitution. _Do a rape kit_. _The people he was with_ … _he might have suffered_ … Ligature marks. Burns. Whippings. _Loki could have died because of her_. _There is no excuse for her behavior_. Frigga can almost taste the vomit sloshing in the pit of her stomach.

“Not to mention the fact that she’s suffering from stage-four kidney disease,” Hill says softly. “She’ll die without a kidney transplant. She is in no condition to be your guardian anymore.”

Robin’s lips begin to tremble and tears spring to his eyes.

“Alright, I think we’re done here,” Dr. Wilson says. “He needs to rest.”

“No, we’re not done,” Robin howls, his chest heaving with indignant sobs. “You can’t just fucking judge her like that. Whoever she killed, I’m sure she did it for the sole reason to protect herself! She wouldn’t harm anyone and … all the rest … Hela isn’t a bad person, okay? I know you think so because you people”—this with a glare at Coulson—“have an embarrassing track record of interacting with people who have a mental illness. You arrested and even shot people for displaying schizophrenic and psychotic traits in public. You paint the mentally ill as evil, monstrous, insane, dangerous, impossible to control. You cast them out, lock them up, tie them to their beds.” He rattles at his own restraints for emphasis, upon which Dr. Wilson finally shows mercy and removes them so that her son can wipe his wet eyes and snotty nose. “To you, we’re all just a sorry ass pile of broken pieces that needs to be glued back together before we can be unleashed on society but you know _nothing_ about what it’s like to be so messed-up that you need drugs to make it through the day because everything is just so painful and crushing and draining. It’s like … It’s the worst fucking feeling in the world.”

Looking into her son’s achingly hollow eyes and hearing his brittle voice, Frigga feels like she’s slowly drowning in a black sea of despair. No sixteen-year-old boy should feel so broken and shattered and be in so much pain and, _please_ , he just wants to hold him. The need to comfort him burns hotter with every passing minute, slowly scorching her. At some point she’ll have to give in or else she’ll burn to ashes.

“Of course living with an addict doesn’t even begin to measure up to the picture book childhood marketed to kids all over the world but just because people or families aren’t whole or healthy it doesn’t mean that they’re not trying to be families. My mother took care of me the only way she learned how and that was enough for me. It doesn’t give you the right to barge in here and make decisions for the both of us!”

Frigga tries to breathe through the wave of pain rolling over her.

Robin does too. “She loves me, I know it.” His voice breaks and Frigga thinks again of how Hela told them to do a rape kit. In a way, Loki’s birthmother does care, yes. She cares in her own horribly twisted, ill-equipped ways but care she does. “I just wanna go home. Please.”

“You can’t,” says Maria Hill, her brows furrowed in empathy. “I know this is hard but you can’t live with her anymore. I’m sorry, sweetie, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let you.”

“But I don’t want to stay _here_ anymore,” Robin whimpers and Frigga can hear the echo of Loki’s toddler voice loud and clear. Her heart swells with hope.

“But you’re mentally and physically unwell,” says Maria Hill, naturally softening her tone to an almost motherly murmur the same way Frigga did when she first heard the shift. “You need medical care.”

Robin’s eyelids begin to twitch but before anyone can get another word out, Thor struts through the door like the roaring hurricane that he is.


	4. Something foreign woven into the threads of his thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robin comes undone. Sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw mention of sexual abuse
> 
> I know this is a human au and Thor isn't considered a hero in this verse like he used to be in the comics or the MCU but here's one quote by Dean Koontz for you that I always associate with Thor no matter in what context: “Thinking too much about [...] anything is not merely a waste of precious time but anti-heroic. Heroes don't think. Heroes act.”

_Screw them_ , thinks Thor as he storms into the room with his brother’s stuff because his self-control has already started slipping away from him when he heard “child pornography” and “child prostitution” and he’s pretty damn convinced he deserves a fucking award for obediently pacing the hallway outside until now. But enough is enough and Leah is right there and if she comes out, she’ll tell them what’s going on and after that, Thor can give her the three million hugs she deserves.

“Hi.”

“Who the hell are _you_?” shrieks Robin, who isn’t just Robin right now, no, Thor can almost _see_ Leah gazing back at him through his not-quite-brother-even-though-he-behaves-exactly-like-his-brother’s eyes. Hill narrows her eyes. Coulson and Dr. Wilson full-on glower at him. Frigga bites her lip. Thor doesn’t care. He can’t just stand by anymore and he doesn’t want to have wasted his chance to spend the day with Val for nothing. 

“I got you a few things,” Thor announces, as calmly as he possibly can, which isn’t easy with the image of his little brother forced to shoot porn and whore himself out burned bright and hot into his mind.

“Mr. Odinson,” Dr. Wilson warns him, drilling his dark gaze into Thor’s. Doctors really seem to hate him these days, uh? “Please, wait outside.”

“What things?” Robin whispers.

“Clothes and stuff.” Thor unzips the bag, ignoring the shrink entirely, and then pulls out his brother’s favorite plush iguana. “And Jorgi. I know you’re technically too old for stuffies but it can’t hurt to have something to scream into, right?” He waves the stuffed animal for emphasis and when he does, he suddenly remembers that Jorgi is just an abbreviation of a longer Nordic-sounding name his four-year-old baby brother pulled out of the bottomless well of imagination inside his little head just like that. Jorgun—something. “What was is his full name again?”

“Jörmungandr,” says Robin. “But you were too daft to remember that, so you shortened it to Jorgi.” He chuckles and Coulson raises an eyebrow, exchanging a glance with Maria Hill, then with Dr. Wilson, who studies his brother like a hawk. _That fucking bastard_. “I used to pretend he was a dragon.”

“Oh, honey,” Frigga murmurs.

“Who lived in a cave with a waterfall,” Thor adds. “Right.”

Robin looks up at Thor then, shock washing over his face. He tries to scramble into a sitting position but his body won’t yet obey him. “Wait, why do I remember that? That’s not … How do you even know about … _Who_ told you …”

“You did.” Thor takes a deep breath. “I’m your brother, Robin. I know about Loki and Nikias and Leah. I know she’s with you right now. I know she’s—”

“I don’t have a brother,” Robin whispers in a voice thinner and more brittle than freshly blown glass. His eyes grow huger by the second. “I don’t have a family.”

“Yes, you do. You just have to remember.”

“You can break through the amnesic walls you built now,” Dr. Wilson, who’s done very little so far, agrees because Robin finally appears to be losing his hold over Loki’s memories. “It’s safe. You blocked out your mother and your brother here because it was probably too painful to remember the past you thought was lost to you while you stayed in LA but now you’re back home and it’s safe to remember them. You haven’t always lived with Hela. What happened to you in LA, it’s not your whole life. You know more than the abuse you suffered there. You have a home here, a family. The mother you grew up with is not a drug addict, Loki.”

Robin’s lids twitch.

“I cared for you,” Frigga tells him softly. “I rocked you to sleep in my arms. I fed you. I kissed you goodnight. You clung to my leg when you made your first steps.”

Robin—Loki?—gulps.

“Come on, I know you’re in there, brother,” Thor urges as softly as he can because he swore to himself he won’t ever lose his temper in front of Detective bloody Coulson ever again. “I know that you know who we are.”

Robin stifles a sob into a whimper and then his eyelids flutter shut.

And, then, nothing. No reaction whatsoever.

 _Whoops_.

* * *

“Loki!” shouts The Voice as Robin stomps off into the jungle. Well, technically, there isn’t a lot of stomping involved because his body feels as weak in here as it did on the outside but he doesn’t care. He just wants to get as far from the cave as possible because CPS doesn’t give a damn what he wants and the doctor is trying to mess with him and if this is all they have to offer, there’s no fucking point in staying. It’s mockery, plain and simple, and he won’t stand for it. If he had a brother, a big brother, a freaking football deity of a big brother who is the freaking quarterback for the Infinity Warriors and looks like he has no troubles kicking in doors and pummeling people into the fucking ground, why didn’t he come for him? It’s what big brothers do, isn’t it?

“Wait!”

“No,” Robin grumbles but The Voice catches up with him embarrassingly quickly— _you weak ass fucking twig_!—and when he does, he grabs his upper arm, spinning him around. He’s towering above him in his ancient Viking god meets Middle Earth elven armor, his long black hair blowing in a soft breeze.

“This isn’t a dream,” says he, the green of his eyes as brilliant as polished emerald. “You can’t run away from me here.”

“Fuck off,” Robin snaps and The Voice lets go in surprise. “You never even told me your name. All you ever told me was that your sole purpose was to ‘protect’ me and that it was too early for me to know more about you and, oh, the capstone of your maddeningly unhelpful counsel? Your oracle-ish prediction that understanding would come to me in time!” He cackles. “Well, guess what, Gil-galad. Understanding hasn’t come to me yet and neither one of you has ever truly _protected_ me! And I don’t care anymore. I’m going to stay here. Let someone else deal with the outside. I’m done. There’s nothing out there that’s worth going back for if they won’t let me go back home.”

“You’ll be able to go home,” says The Voice. “I promise you.”

“Oh, yes? Home with the family that everyone is trying so very hard to cheat me into believing exists?” Robin scoffs. “Just get the hell out of my way.”

The Voice sighs, then rubs his right eyebrow with the back of his thumb. “My name is Killian,” he offers after a pause. “I’ve been with you since you were barely three years old because you could not handle the crushing emotional impact of feeling utterly abandoned when your mother took you to preschool.”

Robin’s lips part.

“You were convinced she wouldn’t come back for you at the end of the day. You felt nothing but pure terror after the doors closed behind her and you froze.”

Robin draws a shaky breath and slumps onto one of the rocks that sit beneath the canopy of palm trees, burying his head in his hands.

“Do you remember preschool?” asks The Voice—Killian—as he places a hand onto Robin’s back and gently caresses him. Robin shakes his head but then, all of a sudden, he remembers _something_ , even if the images pouring into his mind are blurry at best. A large, rectangular room with bright wood paneling, decorated with innocent children’s drawings and messy handicraft. Three huge windows. A potted plant by the door. An indoor playground. An alphabet puzzle play mat. Three little tables, twelve little chairs; blue, green, purple, yellow, orange, pink, red. Eleven other kids trying to get him to play with them, their shrill giggles scaring the living shit out of his tiny toddler ass. Toys everywhere. A giant chalkboard with names written on it in scrawled, childish block letters. Marcus. Lee. Carrie. Sybil. _Loki_.

Robin startles. “What are you _doing_ to me?”

“I’m not doing anything. These are your memories.”

“But …” There are no words. His mind is spinning. He feels sick. _Lies_! These are all lies and nothing but filthy lies. Tricks. Illusions. Something foreign woven into the threads of his thoughts to confuse him. Okay, wow, who’s succumbing to paranoia now? He sounds just like Hela. _Deep breaths_ , _deep breaths_ , _you overdramatic punk_. _Just breathe_. He wishes he had something to calm him. A pill or a razor blade or a fucking gun to blow his useless brains out with.

“What about elementary school, Junior High, Infinity High?” Killian continues, mercilessly. “Do you remember those?”

Robin does, yes. He remembers Erik Stevens and his buddies, ganging up on him in the hallway because he is smarter than them and made them look dumb in class, punishing him, beating him up, kicking his stomach and his back and his skinny fag ass with their athlete shoes. He remembers Principal Acker and his philosophy teacher Mr. Stokes, who too hates him because he is smarter than him and loves to show him up in front of the whole class just because Loki reads the material he gives to the class with that galaxy brain of his that scares—

 _Wait_.

“W-what is happening to me?” he whimpers.

Killian stretches out his hand and, when Robin takes it after a moment’s hesitation, he pulls him up. “Come with me.”

* * *

“Thor!” Leah squeals when his brother’s body’s eyelids finally flutter open again. She’s half-relieved, half-panicked and Dr. Wilson’s mouth gapes open in surprise as he glances up from the medical chart he’s been scribbling onto.

“Yes!” Thor exclaims. Leah props herself up and tries to stretch out her arms but there are all the cables holding her back, the IV bag, the EKG strings, the feeding tube, and she anxiously glances down at them before her eyes search the room for Frigga. “Mama!”

“Oh, sweetie,” Frigga coos. She doesn’t care one bit about the medical equipment. She flies towards the bed and kisses Leah’s forehead, her cheeks, the top of her head; basically turning into a human octopus in front of Thor’s very eyes, growing a million arms out of nowhere, arms that go everywhere at once as she gently pulls Leah up and presses her close. Thor glares at Dr. Wilson, who sports an expression of astonishment mixed with contrition. “Do you believe me now, sir? Is that enough research evidence for you?”

“How did that happen just now?” Hill whispers.

“I don’t know,” Thor lies in the lowest voice he can manage because he does know, or suspects anyway, because he used his brother’s favorite plushie to jog Loki’s memories and maybe he even subconsciously used it to trigger Leah out, which probably wasn’t the most ethical thing to do but, hey, desperate times and all that.

“Why are you crying, mama?” Leah gasps. “You’re making me all wet. And you’re squishing me.”

“I’m sorry,” Frigga half-laughs, half-sobs, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt.

Leah’s hand goes to their mother’s cheek, clumsily petting it. “Why are you sad?”

“I’m not sad, honey, I’m happy,” Frigga sobs. “These are happy tears because I’m so, so glad to see you again. I’ve missed you so much and I was so worried about you.”

Leah nods vaguely and then she looks around. “Who are all these people?” she asks their mother in a whisper, religiously avoiding eye contact with anyone.

“My name is Sam,” says Dr. Wilson and Leah flicks a shy glance at him then. “I am a doctor. You’re in the hospital.”

Leah nods, looking at Coulson.

“My name is Phil. I am a police detective. And this is my friend Maria,” he continues as he gestures towards Hill. “She works for Child Services.”

Leah nods again but Thor can practically see the question marks dancing in her eyes. The poor little thing.

“Are you hurt?” asks Dr. Wilson.

“My head is achy,” whispers Leah. “A-and my throat hurts when I swallow.” Thor gazes at the bruises around his brother’s—sister’s—neck and has to stifle a scream. He imagines it, Loki or Leah, in front of a camera, with someone choking them … _No_ , _don’t do this to yourself_. _Just don’t_. He can’t help it. The images are right there. _Saw_. _Hostel_. _A Serbian Film_. He almost retches. “And I’m very hungry.”

“We’ll get you some food in a bit,” says Dr. Wilson. “What would you like?”

“Pancakes.”

“We’ll make sure to get you some pancakes, okay?”

“With blueberries?”

“Of course.” Dr. Wilson smiles. “Is there anything else that hurts?”

Leah shakes her head and then her hand travels to her stitched and bandaged forehead where Dr. Strange had to shave off a strand of hair in order to place the stitches. Frigga stops her by taking her hands in hers. “You have a head injury, sweetie. Don’t touch it.”

“But it’s all itchy and throbby,” Leah wails.

“That’s normal, I’m afraid,” says Dr. Wilson. “But it’ll pass soon, I promise.” Leah doesn’t look convinced at all. “So, uh, can you tell us your name?”

“Leah.”

“And how old are you?”

“Four,” she says and Maria Hill’s eyebrows shoot up. She scribbles something down, looking very horrified all of a sudden.

“Can you tell us, uh, where Robin went?”

“Inside,” says Leah.

“Is Loki inside too?”

She looks at the psychiatrist, teeth pulling at her lip, and then nods vaguely.

“What’s he doing there?”

“Hiding,” says Leah.

“Why?”

Leah gives half a shrug and her hospital gown slips out of position, baring one bony shoulder and the misaligned collarbone. “Because everything is different now and no one likes it,” she explains, even if it’s not the most helpful explanation. Not to Thor anyway.

“What is different?”

“Nikias is gone and Loki has changed and everything is just _different_.” She rubs her nose with the back of her hand in that clumsy manner of toddlers.

“Where did Nikias go?” asks Coulson and even his voice is suddenly softer. Who would have guessed that there’s a human being hiding somewhere beneath his neat black suit and the shiny golden star-shaped detective badge?

“Thanos chased him away,” Leah replies and her eyes fill with tears.

“How did he do that?” Coulson goes on.

“He did nasty things,” Leah whispers, wiping her eyes. “Nikias didn’t know people could do that to him. He’s a grown-up and he thought he knows everything like grown-ups do all the time but he didn’t know that these things can happen to everyone and not just children and now he’s so scared he won’t come out again.”

“What things?” asks Coulson. “What did Thanos do to Nikias?”

“He, uh …” Leah wipes her nose this time and casts her eyes downwards.

“You don’t have to talk right now,” says Dr. Wilson, shooting a warning glance in Hill’s and Coulson’s direction. “We’ll get you food and then you can just stay here with your mother and rest a bit, alright? You don’t have to answer any questions just now.”

“He petted him,” Leah continues anyway, in a very low voice. “Nikias didn’t like that.”

Coulson looks no less disgusted than Thor feels. “Petted him where?”

“His tush,” Leah whispers and then her eyes go wide and Thor’s anger erupts in his stomach like the fires of Mount Doom after they consumed the one ring. _Please_ , _don’t say it_ , _please don’t say it_ , _please_ _don’t_ —“And his weenie.”

“What about you?” asks Frigga, out of pure instinct. The color of her skin ranges somewhere between vomit-green, pale and corpse-like gray. “Did he do that to you too? Or to Loki?”

Leah nods, then shakes her head, then shrugs. “I don’t know. Loki was gone for a long time.”

“Was he inside the whole time?” asks Dr. Wilson.

Leah nods vaguely. “He was in his special safe place.”

“And where’s that?”

“In a womb,” says Leah and Thor will later swear that Frigga’s skin turned an even unhealthier shade of gray when she heard that a womb was the only place in which her fragile little baby boy still felt safe. “But I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s the place where babies live in their mom’s bellies until they’re big enough to come out,” Hill explains but that doesn’t seem to explain an awful lot to his baby sister. Maybe she’s still a firm believer in the stork as the bringer of children.

“Did Hela do bad things to you?” asks Coulson and Thor doesn’t realize at first that he’s holding his breath.

“Uh-uh. She just yelled at me. She yells a lot because she’s sick but she made me food. She let me sleep in her bed sometimes,” Leah continues and Thor wonders how in the ever-loving fuck Hela didn’t freaking realize that her kid needed a real mother to provide for him. Drugs probably but _dammit_ … can you really be _so_ far gone that you don’t notice you’re dealing with an actual child?! “And she bought me George!”

“Who’s that?” asks Hill.

“My elephant,” Leah exclaims and then her eyes flit across the bed. “Where is he? Where is George?”

“He’s at home,” Frigga shushes her. “He’s sleeping.”

“Stuffed animals don’t go to sleep,” Leah giggles and the sound almost undoes Thor. But in a good way, this time. Her laugh sounds exactly like Loki’s laugh when he was small, bright and carefree and very contagious. “Their eyes are always _open_! Don’t you know that?”

“Of course,” Frigga sighs. “How could I forget?”

“Did Hela ever hurt you?” asks Coulson, his tone indicating that he’s well aware he just steamrolled that precious moment.

Leah shakes her head.

“Do you want to go back to live with her?” asks Hill.

Leah’s eyes widen in terror as she locks eyes with Frigga, then with Thor. “Do I have to?” she asks meekly, her lips quivering.

“No,” Frigga and Thor promise her in unison.

“The question is if you want to,” Hill elaborates.

Leah shakes her head again. Vigorously. “Can I have pancakes now?”

“I’ll just have to ask you a few more questions about your family, if that’s alright with you, sweetie?” asks Maria Hill, silently asking Dr. Wilson for permission with her eyes. “It’ll be quick, okay?”

“You’re very pretty,” Leah tells her, which makes the CPS investigator smile. Wilson gestures for her to go ahead.

“That’s your brother right there, yes?” asks Hill.

Leah bites her lip and then says something that makes this morning and everything else Thor missed out on because of his brother’s brittle mental health throughout his life absolutely worthwhile. “He’s Loki’s brother but I like him to be mine too because he makes Loki feel safe and warm and I like that.”

“But that’s your Mom?”

This time, Leah nods.

“Where’s your Dad?” Hill clears her throat. “Or who’s your Dad?”

Leah’s mouth opens and closes as she thinks this over but then she just shrugs and Maria Hill lets it go. “Do you feel safe living with them? Do you want to go back living with them when you’re well again?”

Leah nods.

“Did anyone ever hurt you or Loki there?”

Leah shakes her head and buries her nose in their mother’s hair, signaling them once more that she’s reached her limit. And this time, no one tries to push her any further, for which Thor is extremely grateful. She’s been through too much as it is.

“Okay, that it’s it for now. Thank you all for your cooperation,” says Maria Hill. “You’re a brave little girl, Leah. Thank you for talking to me.”

“I am brave,” Leah beams.

“Yes, you are,” Thor, Frigga and Hill say in unison.

“Can I speak with you for a moment?” Coulson asks Frigga, jerking his head in the direction of the door.

“Sure,” she says, letting go of Leah. “Thor will stay with you, okay?” She harrumphs. “Is that okay, honey?”

“Sure,” Thor says and Leah smiles at him. It’s a shy smile but so full of love and hope that he has to put considerate effort into holding back the tears stinging into his eyeballs. 

“To answer your earlier question,” Hill says to Thor before she walks out after the rest of the merry little investigation team, “I really don’t think you’re a horrible person.”

* * *

“What is this?” Robin asks when Killian has finally stopped in front of a tree after half an eternity of leading them deeper and deeper into the jungle. A goddamn palm tree, which, _surprise_ , just looks like all the other fucking palm trees surrounding it because, _yes_ , they’re still in a goddamn jungle!

“Look at it.”

“It’s a tree,” says Robin, forcing all his exasperation into his voice.

“It’s not just any tree,” says Killian. “Look closer. Do you recognize it?”

 _It’s a fucking tree_ , he wants to say again but there’s no arguing with that guy, so he gives in and takes a closer look at the damn plant. It has a very specific marking in the bark that looks like a vertical rock crevice and the sight stirs up a memory of a palm tree in the back of a big yard, a palm tree rising out of a bed of bushes and tropical plants surrounding its stem. The yard belonging to the house on 9273 Tournament Canyon Drive. Las Vegas, Nevada. He _was_ there as a kid, wasn’t he, glancing up at this tree in awe, imagining the fantasy world he could travel to through this crevice-shaped opening. _His_ fantasy world. This jungle.

“You wanted to know what this place is?” asks Killian.

 _It is your creation_.

“It’s a coping mechanism,” Robin replies and then he hears Frigga’s voice, blowing through his head like a soft, warm summer breeze. _The voices_ , _that world inside your head_? _They’re coping mechanisms_. _Very intricate coping mechanisms_ , _sure_ , _but they don’t make you crazy_.

Mother?

No, that’s impossible. It’s freaking _impossible_. He didn’t grow up with Frigga and this Odinson guy. If he did, he would fucking _remember_ them because they seem like decent people who aren’t involved in filthy street crap and why would he forget them and not scumbags like Malekith and the Maw and the motherfucking Titan with his awfully big hands? It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s completely ridiculous. They’ve all gone mad. This entire place, Killian, Nikias, they no longer serve whatever purpose they were once created to serve. They’re like a malfunctioning computer program that needs to be reset or, even better, de-installed. What a fucking shitshow!

“Follow me,” says Killian and then parts the thick undergrowth with his sword, revealing a small path entirely shielded from view only a moment ago. The path is curvy and leads to the only building that isn’t made of wood in this entire place. It’s not even a building. It’s a stone structure, reminiscent of an ancient Mayan temple, and there are two tigers standing guard in front of it. _Tigers_. _Fucking tigers!!!!_ Robin loves tigers but, wow, they growl at him and bare their teeth until Killian silences them with a swift, majestic wave of his hand.

Robin walks past the felines, fighting the urge to reach for Killian’s fucking hand, and when he walks up the stone steps towards the roof comb on the top, he once more feels as if he is trapped in some Indiana Jones video game. Inside, it’s too dark to see until Killian lights two medieval-looking wall torches, yes, the design of the world inside his head is actually pretty _far_ from being even remotely consistent, _so fucking what_ , and reveals six platforms and a single crooked stairway leading downwards into … what? A dungeon? A torture chamber?

Robin shudders.

On each platform, there is a single wooden door, shut with giant bolts. “What’s behind those?” Robin asks but receives no answer. Typical. Abso-fucking-lutely typical.

Killian leads him all the way down, deep into the belly of the structure, and towards the last door. This one, he opens and Robin gasps.

What he sees is … a nursery or a maternity ward or, at least, what passes for a maternity ward in a weird ass stone temple. A weird ass stone temple in a jungle inside his goddamn head. The bottom line is … there are babies. There are nine tiny little babies, sleeping in wooden cribs, their eyes closed, their tiny mouths sucking on their tiny little thumbs. They’re hairless, with no eyebrows and no lashes, newborns by the look of it.

“Why … What …” Robin cannot find his voice.

“Do you remember what happened to you, as a baby? Do you remember what they told you?”

Robin’s mouth gapes open. “I don’t …” _Remember anything before … before … now. No_ , _this can’t be true! It just can’t be true._ “Was I ever a child?”

“Of course you were a child but you have—”

“Erected amnesic walls around some of my memories to protect myself,” Robin repeats the doctor’s words in a whisper. “Wh-where do those babies come from? Why did I create babies?”

“They’re holding traumatic memories of emotions and bodily sensations,” says Killian. “Just like everyone else.”

“What memories?”

“That you’ll have to figure out for yourself, I’m afraid.”

“What?!” Robin shrieks, startling three of the tiny creatures awake. As soon as they start mewling, a woman breezes into the room, a woman with no distinctive facial features and a mane of long blonde hair. She shushes them, softly singing a lullaby in some foreign language. No, not foreign. _Norwegian_. Since when is he fucking speaking Norwegian and why does this woman look like Frigga?! And why did he see Frigga in his dreams anyway? Why did he dream of her … Why is she here, in his own world, his dreams, his own fucking mind?! Is nothing sacred anymore?

“Just how many people live here that I never saw?” Robin gasps. “And why did you bring me here if you won’t tell me the whole truth? Why are you always giving me nothing but fucking breadcrumbs? Do I look like Hansel to you? What kind of sick game are you playing with me?”

“You need to remember, Loki. You will only understand if you allow yourself to remember.”

“This is bullshit,” Robin spits and then he turns around and leaves the room, stomps back up the stairs, out of the weird ass temple and down the steep steps of stone. His heart almost beats out of his chest and rockets straight off into the stratosphere when he tiptoes past those damn tigers again. They bare their teeth, lick they’re gleaming fangs and they snarl at him but they don’t attack.

As soon as they’re behind him, he runs. He flicks a glance over his shoulder but Killian isn’t following him. He tries to breathe, tries to make sense of all this. He doesn’t remember his childhood. He doesn’t remember going to school or playing with other children. Doesn’t remember anything that happened in LA before he was a teenager.

Could it be that they’re right after all?

Could he be … is he Loki? And why does this name have such a ring of utter disappointment to it?

 _We know about Leah and Nikias and the others_. _It’s okay if you don’t_ … _Like_ , _if you’re not Loki right now_ , _that’s okay_.

Well, it’s obviously NOT okay, for fuck’s sakes, because that damn psychiatrist and Killian keep calling him Loki anyway.

The same name that was on the chalkboard in his preschool. Loki.

Lokeeeeeee.

 _Fuck_.

That house with the backyard and the palm tree.

Robin keeps running, forcing the air in and out of his lungs, his chest almost exploding as he’s running towards the cave without knowing that this is where he is running.

 _I’m your brother_. _Well_ , _adoptive brother_ , _but still_. _It’s me_ , _Thor_. _You grew up here_. _We grew up together_ , _in this house_. _This is our Mom_.

Thor.

Brother?

Those babies.

 _The mother you grew up with is not a drug addict_.

A kitchen, open plan, light spilling in through the windows.

 _So_ , _this woman … Hela_.

 _She gave birth to you_.

 _She ended up on the streets after she was released from prison and then she got pregnant and she … She was too young to raise a baby_ , _so she brought you here_.

 _I am here because I’m sick and my son is the only living blood relative that I know of_.

No.

 _You_ _almost let him_ _die._

No, no, no!

A bedroom. _His_ bedroom. Dark walls. A shattered mirror. Shards of glass biting into the skin of his fist.

 _Do you really think your brother can deal with you_?

That’s what he didn’t remember.

He’s _adopted_.

Loki Odinson.

He did grow up with them but then …

 _You stabbed your own brother_.

Loki did have a family, yes, but he betrayed them. They took in a filthy piece of trash from the street and tried to love him.

The only problem is that he was never worthy of their love.

That he messed up.

That he can’t go back.

 _Ever_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooookay *deep breath* Thor was right when he whoopsed and also when he thought it was probably not an ethical thing to do to try trigger someone else out. You shouldn't do that, ever. But he was kinda desperate there, wasn't he? And even if he did some research, he doesn't know everything yet. And how could he? He's trying though. He really is. With his anger and everything. Black Feather pointed out to me that it can be quite exhausting to read about his repetitive efforts to calm himself and I very much appreciate their advice because they're a master storyteller and if you haven't checked their fics out, you absolutely should because you won't be disappointed. In any event, the next chapters are going to focus more on Loki's POV again because I know that's what y'all have been starving for.
> 
> A few more things:  
> ~ Aren't we all curious who was there first? Did Loki name the gatekeeper after his stuffed animal or was he, on some level, subconcsiously aware of the gatekeeper and named his stuffed animal after him? I guess both scenarious are plausible and I'm letting you draw your own conclusions.  
> ~ As to Killian ... Yes, he kinda lied. A bit. Loki saw his memories because Killian fronted a lot in school but Loki did have some memories of his preschool. It was an instance of memories bleeding through. And the babies ... Loki wasn't supposed to know about them yet either and I doubt he would've been shown under normal circumstances but I'd imagine the first priority to be to prevent another split and create more alters in a system that is not yet functioning so, again, desperate times call for desperate meausres. If I am wrong about this, please don't hesitate to point it out.  
> ~ Last but not least, it's not always the case that child alters become protectors but Leah has evolved quite a bit and she's certaintly very protective, the sweet thing. So she's kinda taking on a protective role here.
> 
> I hope to see y'all soon x


	5. So safe, so warm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Family reunion part, well, I have lost count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's to breaking through old patterns. Some of them, at least. Others, not so much.

“Frigga?”

Odin’s voice seeps into her subconscious, infiltrating her dream. It’s a pleasant and mostly coherent dream for once, nothing like the sometimes ghoulish, sometimes merely unsettling but always confusing nightmares of the past few months that were so hectic they never made much sense. No, this time, she’s on the beach with Loki and Thor, bouncing a little girl on her lap that she knows is Leah. She can still feel the sun on her face and hear the rumble of the waves even as she is waking up.

“Why are you sleeping on the couch?” asks Odin, eyebrows raised in what might pass for concern. For once true to his word, he returned on Christmas morning, only to find here where she sat down after dinner the previous night and apparently fell asleep fully dressed except for her shoes, felled by exhaustion and relief. After the interview, Coulson had told her and Dr. Wilson that Hela had killed Thanos in self-defense and, even if Frigga foolishly but probably thankfully hadn’t even wasted a thought on this possibility before, thus made sure that the abuser they escaped from wouldn’t track Loki down and ambush him here in Vegas. Leah had stayed in control for the afternoon and since she voluntarily ingested food and water, the doctors at least removed the IV and the feeding tube. She was physically too weak to do anything, though. She drifted in and out of sleep and they watched silly cartoons on the television. When it was time to sleep, she demanded her elephant and Frigga didn’t have the heart to tell her no. As soon as she set a foot through the door of the house, she received a text from Thor. _It’s ok, she’s asleep_. _Why don’t u relax a little_? _I’ll stay_.

 _You don’t have to_ , she texted back.

 _I want to_ , came the reply. And then, so very undeniably Thor: _And you’re old_. _You probably need a break_. _Good night._

She grimaced at this because she does feel a lot older than she did at the beginning of the year. How quickly she’d sunken into a deep sleep that kept her for almost fifteen hours is evidence enough that she can’t handle stress as well as she used to.

“Is everything alright?”

“Hela brought Loki back two nights ago,” Frigga rasps as she struggles into a sitting position, her voice still morning-breathy. “It turns out he’s been living with her after all.”

Odin’s eyes go wide. “You’re joking, right?”

“He’s …” Frigga harrumphs, images of all her son’s injuries rushing into her mind again, threatening to wring more tears from her eyes. _She confessed to complicity to child abuse_ , _child pornography and child prostitution_. “He’s in the hospital. The psychiatric emergency unit, to be more precise. Thor is with him. Loki asked him to stay for the night. Well, Leah did.” They talked about Loki’s condition after Odin’s return from Norway or, rather she tried to explain to him what happened with whatever professional and lay knowledge she had at her disposal at the time, but she still doesn’t know how seriously he is considering it.

“So, he’s in bad shape?” Odin asks and Frigga is still too drowsy to determine if he sounds overly judgmental, so she just nods, whereupon he sighs. “I suppose that was to be expected.”

Silence creeps between them.

“Did he, uh, hurt himself again?”

Frigga nods, trying to compose herself. “But, uh, he was … Hela was involved with a drug lord called Thanos—”

“The Titan?” Odin’s face falls because he too apparently heard the name before. “I thought this guy was a myth.”

“He’ll thankfully be from now on because Hela shot him,” Frigga tells him point-blank. “But before then, he was very much alive and Loki lived with him for almost two months because Hela was sentenced to fifty days of rehab by the courts.”

The color his face assumes is a greenish white. “Was he abused?”

“Tortured even.”

Odin clears his throat. Twice. Thrice maybe. “What about Hela? Did she … Did he donate his tissue?”

Frigga didn’t even think to ask this question until now but judged by what she saw and heard, it’s far from likely. “I don’t think so. She’s dying,” she says in a low voice and, in contrast to Thor, who starts seething with rage whenever someone mentions the other woman’s name, she still feels pity softening her own resentment every now and then. Empathy. A faint spark of love even, for the girl Hela once was before she slithered into the filthy world of drugs and prostitution. “She’ll die if she won’t get a kidney transplant. She is already coughing blood. She’s been hospitalized.”

Odin’s face is unreadable. “Is that why she brought him back? Because she knows she won’t have that long? And how did she even manage to get her hands on him? She was high as a kite. How did she even convince him—”

“She didn’t,” Frigga cuts in. “That other person, Nikias, he went with her voluntarily.”

Odin swallows and his voice is hoarse when he speaks. “Why didn’t you … call me earlier?”

“Because we didn’t need you?” Frigga asks, breathing out a faint, incredulous laugh, surprised by her own honesty. “Because I knew you were busy? Because I didn’t want you to upset him further or push him over the edge again like you did last time? Either one of those or a combination of all three, I’m not sure. Take your pick.”

“You look like you need a shower,” Odin says after a moment of silence, trying his best and failing not to look deeply offended. “I already had breakfast but I’ll make you a sandwich that you can eat on the way to the hospital.”

* * *

When Frigga and Odin—who sternly insisted that, if she still wanted him to be Loki’s father, he’d have to accompany her—step into the hospital room, both of their sons are still fast asleep, curled up together like cats beneath the blanket. Loki has rolled himself into a ball small enough to almost disappear inside his brother’s massive arms that are wrapped around him in protection, his face buried in the fabric of Thor’s shirt, whose chest is rising and falling with booming snores. They’d probably hate her for it but Frigga simply has to take out her phone and snatch a photo to freeze this precious moment in time forever.

“They used to sleep like this all the time when they were little, curled up like puppies in a basket,” Odin reminisces in a whisper, a strange melancholy in his tone, and it fills her with a strange kind of warmth that they had the (almost) exact same thought. She told him everything in the car, everything that the doctors had said, everything that CPS and the police had said, everything that Robin and Leah had told them, and it turned him uncharacteristically pensive. Rueful even. “When did they grow so tall?”

“If only I knew,” Frigga sighs. “I swear I was changing their diapers just last month.”

He grunts and they sit down on the two chairs by the windows, watching the boys they raised together in the kind of silence that people who have known each other for more than twenty years can endure for a long time. Now that everything is said and done, now that the terms of their divorce have been finalized and their fortune and properties justly divided, there is just this. Neither romantic love nor marital union binding them; just an oddly comforting sort of companionship stemming from two decades of a more or less shared life.

After about fifteen minutes, Loki begins to moan in his sleep, his lids and lips twitching.

* * *

“I can’t,” protests Loki, pacing back and forth in front of the cave’s mouth, a sense of dread stealing into every crevice of his fractured mind. He can’t. _He fucking can’t_. Leah is an innocent kid who, according to Nikias, which has to be taken with a grain of salt of course, went through hell and is still so goddamn sweet and precious and they all love her but Loki? How could there still be love for _him_? He is a failure, a traitor, a psycho, a whore, a hopeless freak with no chance of redemption or salvation or—because these concepts have been invented by the Church to enslave the masses under the invisible powers of a binding ideology and don’t mean shit—being heard. Understood. Forgiven. He stabbed … Well, Nikias did the stabbing but Loki didn’t stop him. Loki just chickened out like the pathetic lame ass freaking coward that he is. There is no way they’d—

“But they miss you,” insists Leah, for the hundredth time probably. They’ve been standing there for what feels like an hour and Loki listened to her making everything sound so easy again because she’s a fucking child and has no fucking clue yet that people like Loki don’t deserve love. “They are worried. They want you back! Mama wants you back!”

Loki supposes it’s possible that, even after he messed up on a scale hitherto undreamed of, Frigga still wants him back. She has so much love for him that she might very well be blinded by it. But Odin? Not a chance in hell that grumpy old bastard wants him back. And Thor … _Thor_.

 _Brother_ … _I am so sorry_. _Fuck_. How could he ever look Thor in the eye again? There is no fucking way. No fucking way in hell.

“Just go,” pleads Leah. “You’ll get hugs and nice food.”

“I hate to disappoint you but hospital food isn’t nice food, sweetie,” Loki chuckles. “We can do better than that, trust me. A lot better.”

His words are lost on her. Of course they are. Not least of all because food isn’t the fucking point.

“Please?” Leah whispers. “Go.”

He can’t. _No. Just no._

“Go,” blusters the deep voice from the cave that gave even Nikias the shivers that one time that feels like a lifetime ago because everything is so different now.

“W-who is that?” Loki stammers.

“Jörmungandr,” Leah tells him in a low voice. “The dragon in the cave, he is real.”

Sure, why the hell not? Why not add a fucking talking dragon to this crazy messed-up world inside his screwed-up mind in which a Mayan temple guarded by tigers housing traumatized babies exists? The sky’s the limit in this place, apparently, but, wow, what the hell is this, why is he being forced out, no, no, no, no, please, that’s not fair, just let me stay, holy fuck, _nooooooooooooooooo_!!!

When Loki’s eyes snap open, he’s lying in Thor’s arms and he almost chokes on his heart leaping into his throat. _Shit_. _Fuck_. _Oh please_ , _no_. And yet … these are the same arms in which he felt safe and warm as a kid. Protected. Loved. Held. Cared for. Nothing bad could ever happen to him in those arms because Thor always made everything better. Thor ambushed the bigger kids who pushed Loki’s scrawny six-year-old ass facedown into a puddle of mud after school for fun and giggles and gave them the scare of a lifetime. Thor pulled him up when he fell off his bike because he was too small to keep up but still killed himself trying. Thor kept the monsters away by night and the bullies away by day. Thor was his hero. Thor protected him. Thor, always Thor, _big fucking brother Thor_. These arms might still be able to fix him, save him, cure him, make him whole and sane again, and they’re even bigger now. Warmer. Safer. So safe, so warm, so Thor.

 _Brother_ …

Loki wants to run away, as far and fast as he can.

Wants to set himself on fire because he needs his hunk of a brother so much.

Wants to slap Thor for being so strong.

But, more than that, Loki doesn’t want the moment to end.

And it doesn’t have to, _no_ , it doesn’t have to end just yet. Loki just needs to keep pretending he’s asleep for a little while longer because, as long as he’s asleep, Thor won’t know it’s Loki and not Leah he’s holding in those arms. Sweet, precious Leah who’s still worthy of Thor’s protection. He’d probably flinch from him if he knew that it’s his fucked-up little brother lying in his arms instead of Leah.

Loki tries to compose himself but he can’t. Tears well into his eyes and he starts to whimper.

“Honey?”

 _Oh no_.

His Mom.

Of course she’d still be here. She probably hasn’t slept since—

“Honey, what is it?”

Loki untangles himself then—what choice does he have, really?—but before he can speak, he spots his Dad in one of the chairs by the window and he freezes, whatever it was he wanted to say leaving his throat as a strangled sob. Thor grunts in his sleep because that carefree oaf probably wouldn’t even wake up in the midst of nuclear apocalypse and, _shit_ , _shit_ , _shit_ , _it’s all going to hell now_. Loki gulps.

“Are you alright?” Frigga asks. She is standing right in front of his half-sitting frame now, cupping his cheeks in her hands. Those hands. So warm, so safe. Almost like Thor’s arms but not quite.

Loki nods. Forces himself to because he doesn’t trust himself to speak just now. Maybe not ever. He just wants to cry. Dissolve. Go back inside. Stay and throw himself into his mother’s arms. _I am sorry_. The three lamest, meaningless words in the history of humankind.

“I’ll get the doctor,” Frigga announces.

“No,” Loki pleads softly because if he has to see that Dr. Wilson fellow right now, he’s pretty damn sure he’ll disintegrate. “I’m okay, Mom.”

“Loki?” asks she, tears springing to her eyes as she tries to cradle him close. He squirms free of her touch and Thor’s eyelids flutter open beneath him. For whatever reason, his brother is suddenly all there even though he usually needs to press his snooze button a kazillion times to turn into a vaguely functional human being.

“Loki?” he blurts out but doesn’t wait for an answer. Thor doesn’t wait for answers. Thor doesn’t wait for anything. He jolts into a sitting position and sweeps Loki into the tightest of hugs with those massive arms of his. “God, finally! I thought you were _dead_!”

“And I will be if you don’t let me breathe,” Loki splutters.

“Oh, Loki,” gasps Frigga.

“Sorry,” Thor mumbles, loosening his grip a little.

“I mean it,” Loki pants. “One day, you’re accidentally gonna crush someone with that herculean biceps of yours.”

Thor laughs a breathy morning laugh and then ruffles through his hair. “Gosh, I missed you, squirt.”

Loki wants to protest the moniker because Thor hasn’t used it in ages—he’s far too tall to be legitimately called a squirt now—but he is too grateful for his brother’s love and attention to be rebellious at the moment and, before he knows what’s happening to him, apologies begin to spew from his mouth. “I’m sorry that you got hurt. I-I am so sorry. I don’t know how I can ever make up for—”

“Hey, it wasn’t your fault,” Thor tries to shush him. “Nikias was—”

“Yes, it was,” wails Loki and hates himself for how weak and pathetic his voice sounds. “I didn’t stop him. I-I should’ve stopped him. I-I should’ve stayed in control long enough to make sure … I … I didn’t—”

“Listen, nobody blames you, okay?” Thor takes Loki’s face into his hands, pinning him down with his piercing gaze. Gosh, his brother’s eyes are so unbelievably blue, sparkling like a mountain lake in the sunshine. “I promise you that.”

Loki gulps because their father is right there. He doesn’t dare to look him in the eye though. Head hung low, he whispers, “Dad does.”

“No,” says Odin and Loki freezes once more. He fucking freezes right there in Thor’s arms. “You had a lot to process that day and, even if I only had your well-being and safety in mind, I probably shouldn’t have tried to send you to the psych ward immediately. We should have probably had a proper conversation first.”

“Do you really … A-aren’t you mad?” Loki stammers, his eyes brimming with tears. _Get it the fuck together_.

“I was, yes, because I feared for Thor’s life. Because, for a while, I couldn’t believe what you did to your own brother but, no, I’m not mad anymore,” Odin says softly and then he rises from his chair with a muffled groan. _Shit_. Shit, shit, shit, is all Loki can think when his adoptive father whom he so sorely disappointed walks over to the bed and places both of his hands on Loki’s shoulders. He can’t help but make a tiny gasping sound. “I’m just glad that you are alive, son.”

“Do you really …” Loki stops himself before he can say it, his teeth pulling at his bottom lip. _Nope_ , _there is no fucking way. It’s just_ … _He’s just_ … No, Loki isn’t Odin’s son, never has been, never will be. He’s a piece of filth. He’s Hela’s offspring. The spawn of a pathetic drug addict slash criminal slash prostitute slash murderer. There’s no way in hell he will—

“Do I really what?” Odin’s face is cluelessness made flesh.

“Think of him as his son,” Thor finishes for him because, apparently, his brother’s brain has grown since Loki last saw him. _First of all_ , _your brother isn’t nearly as dumb as you make him out to be all the time_.

Maybe not.

“I know I haven’t been the best father to you or to Hela, for that matter,” says Odin, “but I do think of myself as your father and you as my son and I don’t think anything is ever going to be able to change that.”

Loki tries and fails to suppress a sob. It pushes past his lips in a trembling whimper. Odin stretches out his hand, lets it hovering in the air for a moment, but then the old grump gets over himself and carefully, a little awkwardly even, puts his arms around Loki, giving him the first real hug since his enrollment in Infinity High. It’s suffocating because it feels so wrong. Everything feels wrong. They shouldn’t have missed him. He’s not … They can’t have … Odin lets go after a while and Frigga takes over, which is even worse because her love feels even more wrong. Thor’s love, it’s the worst. Nothing feels right. Not after what happened. Not after what he did. He shouldn’t be _loved_.

“Mo-om,” Loki squirms, tensing beneath her touch. “Stop.”

“I’m sorry,” Frigga says. “It’s just …” She places one hand on his cheek. “Merry Christmas, honey. I missed you so, so much.”

“We all did,” comes from Thor but Loki hardly hears him. He pulls away from his mother then because how could he not realize how much time has actually passed?! “It’s Christmas _already_?”

“Yes,” Frigga replies, playing with his hair. “And we’ve been given the greatest gift of all.”

“Come on, mother,” Loki teases as he jerks his head away. He doesn’t want her to let go, doesn’t want her to stop kissing him. He wants to melt into her, hiding from the world just as he did in the floaty space. He swore to himself on that godforsaken derelict motel parking lot that he’d never push her away again if he got her back but, then again, he doesn’t fucking _deserve_ her. Doesn’t deserve her love, her embrace, her comfort. He’s weak, pathetic, tainted, crazy. Everything about him is _wrong_ and the part of him that has converged with Nikias too many times hates himself more than ever for looking so utterly weak and skinny and fragile in his too big pajamas while Thor and his Dad are towering over him like the freaking mountains of muscle that they are. It’s ridiculous and irrational because it’s genetically impossible for Loki to look like them one day but there you have it. He still hates himself for being so wimpy and why the fuck did he stop eating anyway? It’s not like he despises food like Nikias does because the bastard mistakes natural physical hunger with emotional hunger because everything is a weakness for him.

Loki forces what he hopes passes for a smirk onto his lips. “Don’t you think you could turn the sentiment down a notch?”

“Never,” Frigga whispers but her tone makes it clear that he already tainted her good spirits in less than five minutes. Of course he did. He taints everything.

“So, psychiatric intensive care unit, huh?” Loki asks, glancing around. He’s still connected to the heart rate monitor—the screen of which is showing a heartbeat of a measly thirty-eight fucking beats per minute, which explains why he’s so cold and so fatigued and so out of breath, _dammit_ —but the feeding tube and the IV bag are gone at least. “Can I assume that I’ll be discharged or at least moved to a more comfortable space if I no longer need intensive care or don’t the same rules apply to the psychiatric version of the ICU?”

“You know where you are?” Frigga beams at him, hope flashing through her beautiful eyes.

Loki nods vaguely.

“So you remember Robin?”

“I am Robin,” Loki replies. “Or I was. We, uh, it’s complicated.” Everything is just so fucking complicated and he doesn’t have enough energy to explain it right now. Maybe not ever.

“What I meant was,” Frigga corrects herself, “do you have Robin’s memories of when you came back home or when you”—gulp—“lived in LA?”

 _Oh yes_ , _mother_. _I remember everything_. Except what happened when he was high—shit, he really resorted to drugs at the first opportunity just like Hela and how fucking weak and pathetic is that?—or when Nikias was out or when he blacked out for another reason not otherwise specified having to do with his utterly disturbed brain. _But I do remember the ‘abuse’, because I know that is what you’re truly asking, it’s killing you, isn’t it, but I hate to disappoint you because it wasn’t abuse, no, I fucking asked for it and there’s no fucking chance in hell I’ll ever tell you about any of the filthy things I did in that house. You’d be disgusted, terrified, disillusioned. You’d never think of me the same ever again._

“Some,” Loki settles on saying, which he decides isn’t a lie, mostly because the memories of the night Hela brought him back are fragmented at best and smeared by the Titan’s panacea, which he’ll miss because it’s so much more effective than scotch could ever be. _Ugh_. The only thing he’s sure of is that Leah slipped through at some point, the poor thing.

“So who,” Frigga asks just as Thor begins with, “So, what the hell happened after Nikias left? How did you—”

“Guys, please. Just let him breathe,” his Dad interrupts them both by way of holding up his hand in typical Odin-fashion and Loki has a hard time believing that the man who stands in front of him now is the same man who used to yell at him and smack him with bulging eyes and a red face. He must have been gone longer than three months. Maybe it’s Christmas 2020 already or maybe Odin has multiple personalities too and the father one was held captive in some mental dungeon for the past five years or so. Stranger things have happened. “The police will want to question him again soon enough, I assume.”

“I hope so. I need to tell Mrs. Hill that I most certainly don’t want to go back to LA to live with Hela,” Loki says because, _fuck_ , announcing he wanted to live with Hela in front of Frigga with his whole ass chest was really the worst of the worst things his fucked-up mind ever coerced him into saying out loud.

“Is it true though?” Frigga asks. “That she never hurt you?”

“Yes,” Loki says but his mind flashes back to the day she choked him unbidden and, suddenly, he can see her right there in front of him, can smell her sour breath and look into her wild, feral eyes, _fuck_ , he can even feel the pressure of her fingers on his neck, can feel the air being crushed from his lungs, and he gasps, _no_ , _what the fuck are you doing_ , _pull yourself together_ , _you hopeless fuck_ , _how else are you gonna get out of here_ , but he can’t. He can’t, can’t, can’t.

“Loki!”

He doesn’t even know who’s shouting.

“Hnnnng,” is all that comes out of his parched mouth before he finally manages to pull himself out of his own goddamn mind. “Sorry,” he pants.

“Honey, what did she do?” Frigga whispers as she pulls him back into her arms.

“It was an accident,” Loki rasps, leaning against her shoulder because she’s so warm, so full of love, like a human fireplace, and he’s so beyond exhausted. Too exhausted to fight himself. How did he keep going like this before? Oh right, _drugs_. “I-I’ll tell you but not now. It was my fault. I … Please, just let it go, Mom.”

Frigga looks utterly, miserably concerned.

“I need a glass of water.”

Thor gets him one and the veins in his neck and temples are popping through his skin like mountain ridges. “It’s okay, brother,” Loki whispers because knowing Thor, he’d probably march right out of here to beat Hela senseless if he knew that she almost choked him to death before getting her drugged ass into rehab.

“No, it’s not,” Thor rumbles as Loki greedily inhales the liquid, his brother’s voice like a clap of thunder booming through the air. “She hurt you and she allowed you to get hurt even worse and there’s no way in hell I’ll ever forgive her for it! She’s a fucking menace! I hope her death will be slow and painful!”

“Thor,” Frigga urges him. “This is your brother’s birthmother you’re talking about. Have a little a decency.”

Thor blows out a breath and his nostrils flare.

“She’s an addict, Thor,” Loki reminds him while his brother is trying to disperse his wrath with deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. It’d almost be funny under normal circumstances. “She didn’t … Her actions weren’t her own.”

“You’re really covering for her?” Thor yells. “I thought Robin only did that because he thought she was his mother!”

“She _is_ my mother,” Loki mumbles. “I mean, not like Robin thought, but she’s still … I mean …” He gives up because his mind has turned to porridge. He feels like he should ask if she’s okay but he’s too afraid of the answer and they barely spent any time together anyway. Hela is still a stranger to him. A stranger who was barely coherent on the only day he actually spent with her, almost choking him to death and calling him her punishment on his sixteenth birthday. No, he really doesn’t care about how she’s doing or whether she’ll flatline anytime soon and if that makes him a horrible person, so be it.

He’s a horrible person anyway.

“I want to go home,” Loki whispers, a crushing feeling of emptiness settling in his chest. “Can we please go home?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can hear your hearts breaking but everything is just fiiiiine ♥


	6. Our whole family is a fucking mess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki is trying to cope with his feelings towards his adoptive family and in particular his brother, his trauma, his memories. Thor is trying to help by being a puppy but he's still out of his depth and their relationship is still complicated because even if Nikias is gone, a part of him lingers in Loki's mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since we didn't have a lot of Loki in the past, you'll get another chapter of him trying to deal. I thought it might be appreciated. Trigger warning for Loki's POV applies as per usual, I guess. 
> 
> Have yourselves an angsty little Christmas :)

“I’m fine,” Loki insists when Frigga, Thor and Odin merely exchange a skeptic glance. Okay, he isn’t _truly_ fine, far from it actually, and how could he be _fine_? What does it even feel like to be ‘fine’? Was he ever truly ‘fine’? He isn’t sure anymore, isn’t even sure where the word originates from. The arts, probably.

“I mean, I’m as okay as I can be given the, uh, circumstances,” Loki relents, which is still a massive overstatement. His body is so weak and drained he doubts he’d have the energy to walk out of here without assistance. No, he isn’t _fine_ and he isn’t _okay_ either. The wound on his forehead is throbbing hot beneath the bandage. His head is pounding. He is still somewhat woozy. His throat is still a bit sore from the last time that pervert Malekith choked him, which he couldn’t pull through with because it reminded him of what Hela did to him and Thanos wasn’t pleased with him at all when he panicked and dissociated half-way through the session because Malekith is an important client, _for fuck’s sake_! The bastard really flipped his lid after Loki messed up with Malektih, smacking the back of his head several times with his huge ass paws.

No, he isn’t _okay_. He’s fucking miserable. He wants to disappear. He wants a bath to scrub away all that filth from his skin or, even better, rip his marked flesh off his bones and be done with it. He wants to scream. He wants to cry. He wants to get smashed. He wants to go the fuck home and curl up in his bed and sleep for a millennium. “I won’t hurt myself again, Mom. I promise. I just want food and a hot bath,” Loki pleads because he does want food. Somehow, he’s ravenous all of a sudden. “It’s Christmas, isn’t it? Just get me home. _Please_.”

“I’ll get Dr. Wilson,” Frigga says and the look in her eyes is infuriatingly pitying.

As it turns out, Dr. Wilson, the lucky bastard, has left the building because it’s a national holiday, _duh_ , and the doctor on call, a young Asian woman, wordlessly glances at the heart monitor, takes his blood pressure and then informs him unceremoniously that he’ll have to stay under medical supervision for a minimum of three more days. “You’ve experienced repeated severe physical and mental trauma and abuse for a period of three months,” she explains when Loki starts to protest. “You have a concussion, are probably in withdrawal. We can’t just let you walk out of here, not least because your parents have been temporarily—”

“How about we sue you if you won’t let me leave?” Loki cuts in, flashing her his best sharkish smirk.

“Sue us?” the doctor asks and the look of absolute confusion peppered with a bit of terror appearing on her face is pure delight.

“You sedated me, didn’t you?” Loki snaps. “You sedated me even though you knew I had drugs in my system! That’s negligence, isn’t it? I could’ve gone into cardiac arrest. You’re lucky I’m still breathing! Mom?”

“Nobody is going to sue anyone,” Frigga insists with a sigh—again that damn sigh of hers, she’s probably exhausted already—and her words hit him harder than the comet that expunged the dinosaurs. _They don’t want you home_. _You came back for nothing_ , _remembered them for fucking nothing_. _Maybe Robin was right_. _Living with Hela and Thanos at least taught him not to expect anything from anyone_.

“Loki, please,” Frigga coos all over him as soon as the doctor is out the door again. “You have to understand—”

“Oh, I understand just fine,” Loki snaps because being the most insufferable of little shits is his last defense against the roaring waves of emotion threatening to submerge him and suck him under, into the deepest waters of his self-defeating mind. “The only reason I’m here right now is because you threatened to put me into treatment instead of tolerating my nerve-destroying company just a little bit longer and instead of taking me home now that I came back, you’re doing the same thing all over again! You didn’t even fight for me!”

 _And why the fuck should they_ , _uh_? _Name me one reason why they should_ , _you filthy little worm_! _You besmeared the name of the family that took in a piece of street filth_.

Frigga’s mouth gapes open in surprise, horror.

“Brother, please,” comes from Thor.

“Don’t brother-please-me, you condescending asshole! I want you to leave, all of you!” Loki screams. “If you don’t want me home, I don’t want you here!”

“Stop being ridiculous,” Odin blares, finally sounding like good old Dad again. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere, son! You can’t even sit up for a few minutes straight! When will you understand that these people here are only trying to _help_ you?”

“Dad, stop,” Thor chimes in, riding to Loki’s rescue like the white fucking knight in shining alabaster armor on a majestic stallion that he thinks he is. He puts a hand on Loki’s shoulder and squeezes it. “Look, I know this sucks. It does for all of us because we’d love nothing more than take you home and it drives me fucking nuts that there’s nothing I can do to speed up your recovery. But if our positions were reversed, you’d want me to get better instead of risking me coming home and having a breakdown and hurting myself or having a heart attack, right?”

So fucking reasonable and protective and big-brotherly. Loki hates it. Loki loves it. He wants to rip his brother’s head off. He wants to throw himself back into his arms. _Brother_ , _please_. _Hold_ _me tight_. _I’ll break if you don’t hold me as tight as you can with all those fucking muscles_. “Just fuck off,” Loki snarls but his voice doesn’t carry. Not even close. Unshed tears claw at the back of his throat.

“You don’t mean that.”

 _No_ , _I don’t_. “Shut up,” Loki pleads. “Just … leave me alone.”

Thor shakes his head. “You don’t want that.”

No, he doesn’t. It’s the last thing he wants. _Ever_. But he doesn’t deserve Thor, not after what he did. Not after almost killing him and then popping pills and whoring himself out in some filthy ass porn studio. He’ll only spoil his brother’s good heart and his pure golden retriever soul. “Don’t tell me what I want. Just get out of my face. _Now_.”

“Okay maybe I don’t know what you _really_ want but let me just tell you what _I_ want, okay?” the gullible oaf continues. Does Thor really think that cuddles and love will make everything okay again? “Since you can’t leave and we’re all pretty much stuck here, I was thinking that, maybe, Mom and Dad can get some decent food in here and maybe a lame ass Christmas movie, so that we can at least spend a little quality time together making fun of the cheesy lines?”

“Why are you doing this?” Loki whimpers because his brother’s suggestion actually sounds like fucking heaven on earth precisely _because_ it’d be such a mundane way to spend the day after all the hustle and why can’t he just try a little harder not to be so exhaustingly difficult for once?

“Because I love you and wanna spend time with you, dumbass,” Thor says but then he turns serious, solemn almost. “We all know it wasn’t _you_ who’s been pushing us away all this time. You still want to spend time with us, I’m sure of it. I mean, I don’t know for sure but please, Loki … Just ... Don’t let Nikias win.”

Okay, yeah, that fucking does it. Before he can get a hold of himself, Loki starts bawling like a fucking newborn. “I won’t, I promise,” bursts out of him. “I love you.”

“I know,” Thor smirks but then he slips down next to him so that Loki can snuggle up to him. “Come here, squirt.”

“I love you,” Loki wails again, to remind his brother, himself, Nikias, whoever needs to hear it the most. “I love you.”

When the meltdown has passed and Loki dares to glance up again, Frigga is petting Thor’s head as if he were a puppy that finally mastered a new trick. “And what kind of food qualifies as decent for my boys?”

“Tuna casserole?” Loki whispers. “Sushi?”

“Oh please,” Thor protests. “No fish.”

“I don’t really care, Mom,” Loki assures her. “You can get takeout, for all I care. I’m just really, really hungry.” And he is. He _is_.

“Alright, I’ll surprise you.” Frigga brushes her lips against his forehead before she leaves the room, this weird version of Odin on her heels.

“You need something as an appetizer? A Reese bar, maybe?” Thor asks. “There’s a vending machine down the hall.”

“That’d be nice, thank you.”

Of course cuddles and kisses won’t make him okay again, Loki thinks as his big brother’s bulk vanishes through the door, but wrapped up in his family’s love, he doesn’t feel quite so cold anymore. Until Thor comes back into the room after a while, a huge shit-eating plastered grin onto his face when he asks Loki if he wants to see something cool.

“What?” Loki asks, alarmed, because despite the fact that he used to be the prankster in the family, his big brother has always been quite a worthy contestant of the title.

“Catch!” Thor yells and then throws a snowball at him. A fucking snowball, which Loki manages to catch, if only barely, before it melts in his hands and drips through his fingers, chilling him even more and wringing a shudder from his body. Something cool, indeed. He silently congratulates his brother on the double entendre.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Thor beams, childish excitement radiating off him as he flops down next to Loki on the bed to show him a picture of the parking lot outside. “I didn’t think we’d ever get a white Christmas again.”

“And you absolutely couldn’t have just shown me that picture?” Loki asks, followed by the clattering of his teeth. “You absolutely had to throw a snowball at me?”

“I thought … Gosh, I’m an idiot,” Thor splutters and out comes the hurt puppy expression.

“If you’re waiting for me to contradict you, not gonna happen,” says Loki and what does big hero brother Thor do in response to this? He takes off his sweater, _gah_ , and holds it out to him, parading his ripped, tanned arms. “Sorry. Here, take this.”

“Always so chivalrous,” Loki jibes because, _same old_ , _same old_ , he yearns for and hates his brother at the same time. He longs for that sweater, longs to wrap the warmth of his brother’s love around him and soak it all up, but he still despises himself for it. Will this ever end?

“Is that even a word?” Thor kids. “Come on, just take it. You’re freezing.”

Eventually, Loki dons the sweater, which does nothing to help with the crushing sensation of feeling so impossibly weak and tiny. “This isn’t a sweater, brother. It’s a fucking tent! How big are you now?”

“Not as big as I used to be,” Thor grumbles. “I lost some muscle mass.”

“May it rest in peace,” Loki grumbles back as Thor wordlessly hands him the candy bar.

He takes the tiniest, most careful little bite because even if he is hungry, he still doesn’t trust himself around food. He doesn’t know why but he’s convinced he’ll throw up out of nowhere or … whatever. He doesn’t know, doesn’t _understand_.

“If it’s too big for you, we can share,” Thor offers and the expression of pity in his eyes as he watches Loki trying to eat is beyond infuriating.

“Are you sure you want to keep sullying that divine body of yours with gross matter like this while your football buddies live off steaks and egg whites alone?” Loki snaps because there it is again, this inexplicable, all-consuming and entirely uncalled-for need to hurt his perfect brother, gnawing at him, driving him almost insane. Nikias is gone but a part of him lingers. It’s beyond infuriating as well. Everything is beyond infuriating, come to think of it. “You’ve got to think about the future, brother. You won’t have the body of a twenty-year-old demigod forever. At some point, you’re gonna plump out if you aren’t careful about what you put into your mouth.”

“Ouch.” Thor grimaces and but even though his tone is light, almost forcedly so, he does seem hurt, offended, looking slightly busted even. “Thanks for being an ass when I’m only trying to help,” he says. Loki figures he meant it as a joke but he can’t seem to shake off the hurt expression.

Loki makes a point of polishing off the chocolate bar without much chewing. It’s good, really, and he’s so, so hungry! At least he’ll be able to eat in peace now because the food-loathing part of Nikias has thankfully vanished with him. “I’m your little brother. Being an ass is part of my job description.”

Thor doesn’t say anything to this. He just fiddles with his hands for a few moments and then clears his throat. “Did you, uh, I mean, did Thanos starve you or did you, you know, starve yourself?”

“I didn’t _starve_ myself,” Loki protests because that makes him sound as if he were anorexic and if that _were_ true, which it isn’t, his brother and father would probably think him even weaker and even less of a man and, despite the fact that he _knows_ their idea of manliness needs some serious revision, he can’t risk _that_. “I just …didn’t eat because I was never really hungry anymore.”

“Trauma can do that, I imagine,” Thor says softly and there’s a strange aura of humility swirling around him that Loki never sensed before. It’s odd because, even if Thor is still the same, he’s still somehow changed and, _wow_ , _does that really surprise you_ , _worm_? “For me, it was the other extreme. When you were gone and I wasn’t allowed to exercise for a while, stuck with all this pain and all my anger, I just kept eating, like all the time. I couldn’t even bring myself to care about my body for a while.”

Loki is pretty sure Thor’s lying because he certainly doesn’t look as if he’s been stuffing his face for months but, then again, his brother wouldn’t make something up that makes him look weak just to comfort Loki. “How many games did you miss because of me?” he asks when he finally feels brave enough to hear the answer.

“Because of Nikias, you mean?” Thor sighs and a profound sadness shadows his features. “All of them.”

Loki’s stomach plummets all the way down to his feet. “What?!”

“I have to sit the entire season out. I won’t be allowed back out on the field until camp next year,” Thor explains.

“Shit,” Loki whispers.

“Yes,” snorts Thor.

“Fuck,” Loki murmurs. “I’m sorry. Shit. Why don’t you … hate me?”

“Because you didn’t do it, doofus.” Thor laughs grimly and, then, his temper flares up without prior warning. “But Nikias … _Damn_. I don’t even know what this guy’s problem is. Honestly! I don’t know how much you actually remember but, on the day you tricked me into giving you driving lessons, he suddenly appeared and he just …I don’t even know. Hell, that was your first time behind the wheel of a car, a stick shift, for fuck’s sake, and he just pulled onto the fucking Highway and then started speeding, as if he wanted to kill us both. It’s actually pretty ironic because I yelled at him that if we got into an accident and I broke a bone and couldn’t finish the season, I’d fucking kill him.” He snorts but tears are shimmering in his eyes. “I averted the accident but he still got to me later, didn’t he? I still can’t finish the season and, yes, I’m pretty fucking mad about it. Damn that sonofabitch. I mean seriously, what’s his problem?”

If only Loki knew. He’s never understood Nikias’s intentions himself because, despite everything the ill-tempered bastard tried to deceive Loki with, Thor does care, _he fucking does_ , the evidence is right there for the Jury to look at but still—

“Fuck,” Thor blusters. “I just wanna know, Lokes. What kinda beef does this guy have with me and why? I mean, I get it, I was an asshole but so were you. _You_ started the whole asshole gig and I just don’t get it!”

Without warning, Loki bursts into tears again because, _news flash_ , he’s a pathetic little wretch with zero control over his emotional fucked-up-ness.

“S-sorry,” Thor stammers, squeezing Loki’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to … I … Sorry. It’s not your fault. I just … wanna understand. I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Loki whispers.

Thor’s eyes go wide. “What are you sorry about?”

“No, I meant that, uh, I wanna understand too.” He wipes his eyes. “It’s just … I can’t tell you because I … I … It’s just …”

Thor shushes him then, looking utterly devastated. “That’s alright. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up so soon. You went through hell and you need to rest, brother. I’m sorry.”

“So did you,” Loki whimpers. “You almost died because of me.”

“But I didn’t,” Thor replies with the certainty of a planetary orbit. “It was far worse to live in a reality in which I’d lost my brother. I mourned you like crazy. But I have you back now and I’m fine. Don’t worry about me, okay?”

Loki searches for his brother’s gaze with teary eyes, silently pleading for honesty.

“My life hasn’t been what it used to be, yes,” relents Thor, “but I was just injured, nothing more. I was injured before, remember? Many times, in fact. I was in an actual coma for a while this time, true, but then I healed. I couldn’t exercise for almost two months, which almost made me fly out of my goddamn mind, just ask Mom, I was an absolute pain in the ass, and I still can’t play football yet, which drives my temper up the wall sometimes, but this is just a precaution really. I’m good, Lokes. I’m good. I didn’t go through … whatever you had to go through because we didn’t come for you.”

If only they had … If only … _Nope_ , _can’t think about that right now_ , _just can’t_. _Focus on something else_ , _please and thank you_. “Can I see?” Loki snivels.

Thor’s face transforms into a question mark. “See what?”

“Where Nikias, uh, hurt you.”

Thor rolls up his shirt and reveals a nasty, ragged scar, several scars actually, between three and ten inches long, the shape of the marks on his brother’s skin reminiscent of tree branches or antlers.

“Does it still hurt?” Loki whispers, not trusting his voice, not daring to touch the spot where Thor’s perfect skin was mangled by Nikias who had the audacity to use Loki’s hand to … to … to do _this_. To endanger— _I didn’t kill your shithead brother_ , _okay_ , _he’s recovering in the hospital_ , _so stop whining_ —his beloved brother’s life. To put him in a coma. To jeopardize the career he’s been preparing for since Junior High. To—

“Nope,” Thor replies, his voice, probably deliberately, light. “It just itches. Especially since the temperatures dropped.”

Another sob explodes in his chest then, and it’s a painful one.

“Hey, come here,” Thor whispers, trying to pull Loki into a soothing, much-needed hug that he doesn’t deserve because he allowed Nikias in and he allowed his brother to get hurt and he’s the worst of the worst damaged and broken adopted scum in the known universe. He flinches from Thor’s touch even if he craves it more than anything.

“Loki, please.” Thor is begging, actually fucking begging at this point, and he starts crying too, which is the oddest thing, really, because Thor just doesn’t fucking cry. He did once, in the bathroom of their mother’s cabin half a lifetime ago, and Loki never thought he’d see it again but here he is, his rock of a brother, shedding actual tears. “I just wanna hold you, like I used to when we were younger, because I fucking miss that. I miss my brother. I miss hugging you the way I could before Nikias came along.”

Loki crumbles then because, _dammit_ , he misses that too, more than Thor could _ever_ know even if he were to live a thousand years. He allows his big brother to pull him close, allows him to wrap Loki up in his warmth, his protection, his love. “I feel like we’ve got to make up for three years of lost hugs,” Thor continues. “Because, _fuck_ , I missed you so much. I missed you even before Nikias left for LA. I’m so glad I finally have my brother back, you have no fucking clue. I love you so much.”

Loki hears these words but, somehow, they don’t make sense to him because how could Thor still love him? How could he still want him? How could he still … “Why?” he whimpers.

“Because you’re the most important person in my life,” Thor whispers against Loki’s hair. “We used to tell each other everything but then you became so withdrawn and didn’t trust me anymore and it hurt. It hurt a whole fucking lot. I wish we could just go back to you telling me what bothers you or”—at that he gulps—“what happened to you.”

“I can’t,” Loki snivels because even if he _wanted_ to, there’s no way to explain the house … the customers … the sick kind of pleasure … the drugs … the girls they brought there to … to … It’s too much. _It’s just too much_. “I mean … I can’t talk about it … I … It’s too much …”

Thor cradles him closer. “I understand.”

“You don’t,” Loki snivels. “And that’s okay, I …”

“I’m just wondering why you never tried to call or …” Thor’s voice breaks.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Loki snivels, remembering the day he did call and their Dad answered the phone. “I thought …”

“What?” Thor prompts him softly.

The fear. The disgust. “I’m not family,” Loki begins. “Not by blood. Nikias did something so horrendous with my hands and I … I didn’t think anyone would believe or forgive me, not even Mom. I thought I’d burned my bridges. That you wouldn’t want me anymore. That you’d put me in the psych ward or jail and just leave me there to rot.”

Thor’s expression is so pained that Loki wants to vomit. “Oh, brother …”

“Dad was so fed up with me, I …” Loki wipes his eyes because, finally, there is a chance to talk about something else and even if they’ll be talking about their father, it’s still better than talking about Los fucking Angeles. “What’s up with him anyway, uh? He’s acting weird.”

“Mom divorced him,” Thor says and, for some reason, it doesn’t upset Loki as much as it did when Frigga told him they were going to take a break. “That was kind of a wake-up call, I guess? He said some pretty nasty things about you and then he apparently lost it completely. He told me later that he’d said things to Mom he shouldn’t even have thought, things that he’d possibly regret for the rest of his life. I don’t know what actually went down between them but Dad flew to Norway to cool down and, apparently, Uncle Tyr read him the riot act because he came back like … like this.”

“He’s scaring me a little,” Loki admits.

“I know, right?” Thor chuckles softly. “It’s scarier when he hugs you than when he yells at you.” He laughs again but then turns outlandishly pensive. “I should probably talk to Dr. Fowley about that.”

Loki’s heart skips a beat. “Who’s Dr. Fowley?”

“My shrink,” Thor informs him nonchalantly.

Wait, _what_?! Okay, it’s official now. He landed in another dimension, another timeline, another universe even. “Your shrink?” Loki echoes. “Mr. Solid-as-a-rock has a shrink?”

“Mom made me go.”

Loki still doesn’t trust his ears. “Why?”

“Because of my anger issues,” Thor mutters. “I flipped my lid and trashed her kitchen in a fit of rage and scared the living shit out of her, so she got help for me. It started out as a family therapy thing but then we worked through our issues and now Dr. Fowley is my shrink and Mom searched for her own.”

“So, you’re all in therapy,” Loki concludes, eyes wide. “It’s not just me? You’re all … Shit.”

“Why are you even surprised?” Thor laughs and ruffles through his hair again and Loki is trying his damnedest not to think about how Thanos always reached for his hair, _no_ , _no_ , _noooo_ , _think about_ _something else_ , _anything else but this_ , _ANYTHING_ , but the memories are there now, crawling through his mind like a restless colony of fire ants, and he hears HIS voice, this deep, fake-soothing murmur, and, as soon as he hears it, his chest tightens and then follows the tingling in his fingers, the itching under his scalp, the longing for a certain chemical something to take the edge off and catch the thoughts racing through his brain.

“Our whole family is a fucking mess, Lokes,” Thor goes on but then stops when he sees his little brother’s face, pinched in a frown, eyes wide, gasping for air that just isn’t there anymore. “Loki?” The oaf is scared. Thor is fucking scared and rightly so because what if Loki loses his shit again and gets him hurt again and, _dammit_ , he fucking got himself addicted to drugs, _you wretched failure_ , _how could you_ , breathe, just breathe, can’t, no air, he gasps, gasps at the invisible weight crushing down on his chest, _no one gets to play games with me_ , _is that clear_ , _especially not some pathetic drug whore’s little bastard child_ , _hey_ , _you look tense_ , _baby_ , _I’ll take care of it_ , _I’ll make it better_ , _shshsh_ , _I have something for you_ , no air, just this, Thanos’s face, looming in front of his, _you don’t even know how pretty you are_ , _do you_ , no air, no air, gasp, gasp, his hands, shit, those HANDS AHHHRRRGGHH.

“Loki!”

And then it comes, the idiotic question he told his imbecile of a brother not to ask close to a million times. 

“Are you okay?”

Loki howls.

He just fucking howls, alerting half the hospital staff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This went well, didn't it? *coughs* Let's see where they go from here, shall we?
> 
> I have to say though, this is probably the last chapter that will come at this rhythm because I am neither overly motivated nor inspired to work on what happens after at the moment. I am committed to it still, you won't have to fear that I'll abandon this series (I would NEVER), and the rest of this story exists as a million very fleshed-out scenarios in my head and in documents with outlines and snippets of conversation. It's just that embarking upon the journey towards emotional healing will be insanely more difficult for me to get in the mood for than writing angst and whump xD Not to mention that I'll have to do a bit more research for this one.
> 
> See you all soon and stay safe and healthy everyone x


	7. Loki never stood a chance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone tries to make amends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how this chapter even happened. Too much booze probably. Anyway, enjoy (which I know you will in parts because Thor is such a puppy *crumbles into a heap*)

Thor knew it wasn’t gonna be easy. He knew Loki’s recovery was gonna take an awful lot of time, effort and patience. He knew it was gonna be painfully, endlessly hard work involving a lot of tears and meltdowns and misunderstandings and shouting and raw nerves. That it was gonna be terrible and exhausting and downright maddening.

He _knew_ it.

But that doesn’t mean he isn’t equally frustrated and terrified when Loki starts screaming and thrashing around in his hospital bed, _out of literally fucking nowhere_ , because he didn’t even do anything or say anything this time that could justify a meltdown like _this_ but his brother’s skinny limbs are flailing everywhere anyway, green eyes wide and filled with terror as screams tear loose from his throat.

The doctor and two nurses storm the room at once, demanding to know what happened.

“N-nothing happened,” Thor stammers but they just glare at him because he broke his brother’s bones once and the hospital staff is still wary of him. _Serves you right_ , _you fucking_ _brute_. “We were just talking, I swear!”

Were they really?

“Can you hear me, sweetie?” asks the doctor then but her words fall on deaf ears because Loki is fucking trapped and starts clawing at his arms, fingernails tearing deep into his flesh, drawing blood. The doctor bends down to him, hovering over him, and Loki lashes out like a cornered beast, elbow jerking upwards, almost crashing into the doctor’s face. She grunts and then nods towards the nurses, who bring out the restraints again.

“Is that really necessary?” Thor asks but they just silence him with another glare.

“NOOOOOOOO,” Loki howls, squirming and thrashing around some more when they come too close, almost choking on his rapid breaths. “NOOOO! Please … no … no … chains.”

“We’ll have to put those on if you don’t calm down, to protect you from hurting yourself,” the doctor explains. “Do you understand?”

Loki lets loose another scream, sounding like a mortally wounded animal. What those people did to him, chaining him, branding, whipping, burning, choking him; treating him like a stray dog with no worth who doesn’t deserve an ounce of respect or dignity. _The people he was with_ … _He might have suffered_ … _Just do a rape kit_.

No, Thor tries to convince himself as he watches them push a screaming, flailing Loki into the pillows to restrain him, he didn’t _cause_ this. _He_ didn’t _do_ this to his brother. They did, whoever _they_ are. Thanos, Hela, the dark world of drugs, prostitution and pornography—and nope, he still isn’t over _that_ part and he doubts he’ll _ever_ get over it—they inhabited, the scum they surrounded themselves and his already mentally unstable baby brother with on a daily basis. Thor might have accidentally triggered him, yes, even if he has no clue what he did that upset Loki that much. Okay, he was prepared to trigger him out even though he wasn’t yet ready to remember— _selfish jerk_ —and told him about the divorce and the therapy, dousing him with all this information that was probably too much at this point but ... he didn’t _cause_ this.

It’s not his fault—not entirely at least—that Loki’s mind is in shambles. Loki is traumatized. Anything might trigger him.

It’s not Thor’s goddamn fault.

_Whew, therapy is really working. Who would have thought?_

When his brother won’t stop screaming, they sedate him once more—again without paying any attention whatsoever to his objections—and the minutes before the tranquilizer takes effect seemingly stretch into eternity, leaving Thor with nothing but a whirlwind of rampaging thoughts he can’t grasp as he watches Loki cries ebbing away into sobs and then into soft whimpers.

“My hair,” slurs Loki, before his eyelids flutter shut.

“What about your hair?” Thor asks but his brother is already snoring, reminding him of a tiny baby hamster. If only Thor could give him peace of mind and take all the trauma away. If only he could protect him and chase away the dreams as he could as a boy.

He doesn’t even want to think about, can’t even imagine, how absolutely terrified and violated Loki must feel, how much pain and fear must crash down on him, to produce cries like that, cries that come from a place so dark and so deep that Thor knows he’ll never reach it, never understand it. He isn’t sure he wants to. Isn’t sure he could handle that much pain. _You’re a fucking coward_ , _Odinson_.

My hair.

Greasy black curls, even longer now, sticking out in all directions as if he put a wet hand into a power socket. The doctors didn’t even give him a good cleaning or anything, Thor rages inwardly. They’re just leaving him here, in this bed, waiting for the treatment center to admit him so they can rid themselves of the inconvenience. _Fuck them_. Before he can explode, Thor walks over to the sink, soaks a towel in warm water and gently begins to dab his brother’s sunken cheeks, his forehead, his bruised neck, his chest, under his armpits, softly talking to him, subconsciously imitating their mother’s tone and timbre.

When their parents come back with enough takeout containers from their favorite steakhouse to feed a small nation, Frigga coos and awwws all over him before her eyes land on the four-points. Then, her face falls, emotions rapidly chasing each other in her eyes. Disappointment. Disbelief. Hopelessness. Fear. Anger, maybe? “Honey, what happened?” she asks softly, followed by the release of a shuddering breath.

Thor tells her everything because his mother’s gaze never fails to wring every last drop of truth out of him and she nods. She just nods, then sighs, looking old and sad and heartbreakingly miserable.

“It’s gonna take time,” Thor reminds her, himself. Even if Loki is back and their father apparently had a major change of heart, they won’t magically be a family again overnight just because their own private little Christmas miracle seemed to have happened. His parents are divorced, Loki has been through hell and back several times, his mind is in ruins and he is afraid and angry and hurting, and they are hurting with him, Frigga especially. And they probably will be hurting for an infinite number of days to come.

“I know,” sighs Frigga, sounding every bit as crushed as she looks.

Thor’s phone buzzes halfway through the meal he and his parents have dug into with very little enthusiasm by Loki’s bedside and Frigga’s gaze darts to him when he almost jumps, heart beating insanely fast all of a sudden. He immediately checks who texted him, he simply has to, _these are the unwritten rules of social interaction_ , and tries to keep his hopes in check.

But it’s HER after all and Thor tries to compose himself despite the frantic lurching in his stomach.

 _Merry xmas_ , Val has texted him. Just two inconspicuous words but those two inconspicuous words are enough to electrocute him right where he sits. He puts his fork down and swallows the hearty mouthful of steak and mashed potatoes he’d been chewing on.

 _Merry xmas to u too_ , Thor texts back, not knowing what else he could possibly say and, _dammit_ , his mother is really watching him instead of Loki now. Why did he even tell her he’d had a date? Why does he always have to blurt out the truth like that?

 _Your brother ok_?

Thor looks at Loki, sedated and restrained, and sighs inwardly. _No_ , he texts back because he is a miserable liar and even if he weren’t, lying to her wouldn’t get him anywhere. Lying never gets anyone anywhere and his brother is the living proof how much damage lies can do. _Far from it actually_.

 _That sucks_. _I’m sorry_.

 _Yeah_. _And u were right_. _He’s carrying enough baggage for the both of us_ , _so_. It’s pointless anyway, isn’t it? Hell, Thor is pretty damn sure that it is. He lost Sif, the first girl he ever cared about, the first girl who kept him awake at night, because he asked her to leave the first night they could spend together unsupervised when Loki succumbed to his night terrors due to Frigga’s absence. Because she poured her heart out to Tony Stark afterwards and Tony told her that Thor would always chose Loki over her, over anyone else in his life, really. He could still smack his friend for that because Sif was fierce and strong and beautiful, a warrior princess who emerged from ancient myths to dwell among mortals.

And now there’s Val. Fierce, strong, beautiful.

 _Thanks for the wishes_ , _I guess_? Thor adds because he’d still chose Loki over anyone else if worse came to worst, even if he’s eerily sure he’s kinda falling in love. But Loki, Loki is family. Loki is his brother. Thor’s name was Loki’s first word, for fuck’s sake. It sounded more like ‘thaw’ back then but it came before ‘mama’ and way before ‘dada’. Loki needs him in ways Thor never fully realized and there’s nothing more important on this earth than mending the relationship with his baby brother.

Val starts typing, then stops. Starts typing again, stops again. It’s making his heart beat faster, makes him giddy. Takes his mind off Loki’s hair, his injuries, his screams, and the awkward Christmas lunch. Transports him back into the bathroom of the MGM. The blood rushes downwards instantly and his jeans suddenly feel a bit too tight around his crown jewels. He awkwardly shifts his weight. Come on, get a grip, Odinson. Your parents are right there!

 _I’ve been thinking_ , the answer finally comes. _We’re all carrying our share around with us_ , _right_? _Wanna get drunk on martinis with me_?

Thor can feel the smile tugging at the corners of his lips. _U serious_?

 _Come to the bar in The Venetian and you’ll see_ , Val texts back, followed by the clinking champagne glasses emoji.

 _That where your suite is_? Thor texts back, adding the volcano emoji for good measure.

_Fire wouldn’t have been enough, eh? You’re so full of yourself that you had to choose the whole fucking volcano?_

Thor grins. He actually fucking grins despite … everything. _What can I say_? _You’ve experienced what I’m capable of_.

 _Have I_ _really_? comes the reply.

Thor’s grin goes even wider. _Want me to refresh your memory_?

 _Stop talking and get your ass over here_ , _alright_?

Al-fucking-right.

Thor clears his throat, uncomfortably aware of both of his parents’ gazes lingering on him by now. “I’ll go now, if that’s okay,” Thor announces. “I, uh,”—he actually has to clear his throat _again_ like some pathetic, enamored little school girl—“kinda have plans.”

Frigga’s beaming smile tells him she’s seeing right through him and Thor hates how it makes him heat up with embarrassment. “Have fun, honey,” says his Mom and he has to resist the urge to stick out his tongue.

“I’ll see you guys later,” Thor mumbles but doesn’t wait for an answer. Loki is sleeping, sedated and safe, and there’s nothing he can do for him. Not right now.

No, right now, it’s Thor time and he struts out of his brother’s room, the hospital, feeling twenty feet tall.

* * *

Odin glances after his son almost longingly because Tyr was right, of course. He is a flaming coward who doesn’t know how to carry himself around his family anymore, Loki especially, not after everything, and he’d love to be anywhere else than in this hospital room right now.

Frigga, of course, sees right through him. “You don’t have to stay.”

He searches for her gaze and when she locks eyes with him, his heart crumbles. He loves her still, more than words could say really. Truth be told, he has never been able to find the words to tell her in the almost twenty-three years they spent together and it’s strangely, infuriatingly ironic because he _is_ a wordsmith in court, he wouldn’t be such a successful lawyer if he weren’t, but when it comes to Frigga, his personal life, his family, words have always eluded him.

“I want to,” Odin replies even if he doesn’t. Well, he does and he doesn’t. It’s complicated. Returning to Vegas and facing the family he shut out for years after the conversation with his brother in Norway was hard, probably the hardest thing Odin Borson has ever done, but he is here now and he owes it to them. Tyr was right about that too. He won’t run again, even if he wants to. He doesn’t want to want to run, how about that.

Frigga raises an eyebrow at him. God, how beautiful she is. She’s wearing the black jeans and the azure wool sweater she quickly donned after her shower this morning, nothing fancy or extraordinary, but she’s still looking like a goddess. “What is Thor up to?” Odin brings himself to ask because it would have been impossible even for a less-trained observer to miss his son’s jitteriness and Frigga’s smirk. Their exchange made it clear that, in contrast to him, Frigga is still a part of Thor’s life, that he still tells her things just as he always did.

“He met a girl,” she tells him.

“Oh,” says Odin because, well, Thor _always_ meets girls. They are drawn to him by the insane sexual charisma he’s broadcasting that stirs up flames of envy among his male peers and intoxicates every female being who enters his orbit. None of Thor’s relationships has ever lasted longer than a few months though and that is a generous estimate. The boy has never been in love. “It was about time he gets to blow off some steam.”

Frigga rolls her eyes in response and Odin has no idea what he said this time. “What?” he brings himself to ask for once.

“I’ll let you figure it out by yourself,” Frigga says slyly, her fingers playing with Loki’s hair. Someone should paint her, thinks Odin.

The silence that follows bears further testimony to how much they have grown apart even if they parted ways on amicable terms eventually.

They talked a lot too and, for once, Odin listened. He listened to how she talked about Loki’s condition, which is certainly one of the more outrageous things a parent has to wrap their head around and he still has a hard time believing that his adopted son has multiple personalities even if he interacted with a literal toddler the weekend before their world collapsed in on itself. He listened to her talking about the childhood abuse that occurred under his own roof while he hid away behind the case files piling up on his desk so he wouldn’t have to deal with this hysterical toddler shrieking the whole house down as soon as he came home on any given day. He listened to her accusations that his glorification of violent behavior and his praise of Thor’s manliness had skewed his boy’s understanding of abusive behavior while he was growing up. They argued about favoritism in length, accusing each other until Frigga made her case, telling him that, apart from his anger issues, Thor grew into a healthy, confident young man even if she paid more attention to Loki whereas Loki suffered greatly under his rejection.

And the irrefutable evidence is lying under Odin’s eyes now, bruised, restrained, broken. Yes, he did wrong by his adopted son in many ways, by all of them. He ridiculed Loki’s mental instability. He frequently barked at him to pull himself together. He hit him in the face despite the fact that he has first-hand experience of how direly it crushes your spirits when the father whose love you crave so desperately punishes you for no apparent reason. He left him in the car that one time when Loki was four because he just wanted to get something from the firm real quick and then promptly forgot about him when people swarmed him, demanding things, and only remembered when someone phoned to his office about the child whimpering in his vehicle. He didn’t tell Frigga about it even though he knew, even back then, that he should have but he was too much of a coward to endure the lecture, so he kept silent despite the horrible nightmares that followed. He silently accused Loki of taking off with his birthmother just to spite them because he was ungrateful when, in reality, he was abducted by one of his personalities and had no say in the matter. He turned away from Thor when he was in a coma just because he couldn’t keep a lid on the temper he inherited from his own abusive father and then passed on to Thor along with his DNA and his name like a family curse. He purposefully hurt Frigga with his words to punish her for rejecting him as if she didn’t have every right to turn away from him.

And now the love of his life no longer reciprocates that love, his eldest has lost all the respect and admiration for him that sustained Odin in the past and his youngest flinches from his touch in fear because he hurt him before. His family eyes him like a stranger with hostile intentions sometimes, someone to be wary of, and he let it come to this because he was under the ludicrous impression that giving Loki the cold shoulder would teach his son how to compose himself while, at the same time, reducing the chances of losing control in his presence.

How ignorant and downright foolish he has been.

Self-reflection, Odin finds, has lost nothing of its inherent, excruciating painfulness since he walked the Norwegian coast to clear his mind.

Odin glances at Loki once more, his eyes lingering on his son’s bruised throat, his haggard frame, his black hair, his pale skin, his jutting cheekbones. If he is honest with himself, which he has been for a quite a while now, despite the pain that comes with it, he’s only admitted half the truth to himself so far.

The real problem, the thing about Loki that bothered him most of all, was his strong resemblance to Hela. Despite being a child in need, Hela did infuriate him beyond measure when she stole from them and rebelled against them despite Frigga’s tireless efforts to integrate her into the family. Odin tried to love Loki but the painful truth is that he never really felt like his. Frigga instantly showered the tiny baby he once was with love but that’s who Frigga is. She’s been overflowing with love ever since Odin met and hopelessly fell for her, crackling and sizzling like an interplanetary magnetic field. But he could never quite establish the same connection with Hela’s boy. And the older Loki grew, the more he resembled her and the more Loki resembled her, the more he reminded Odin of his former stepdaughter’s blatant impudence. His temper flared because of Hela. Because Loki was a Helason, not an Odinson, and the evidence was glaring at him every day from those deep, tormented green eyes, pleading with him to love him despite all the turmoil he was causing.

It infuriated him because he’d _told_ Frigga that this was going to happen. Loki was a drug addict before he was even born. He never had a chance with those genes, with everything Hela did to him as a newborn. Odin allowed himself to hope, of course, and it worked most of the time when Loki was still small, but as soon as Loki grew into a teenager, Odin lost all hope. He had to watch Loki straying and couldn’t make him see. He couldn’t stop him from drinking, from hurting himself, from being so goddamn tense and hysterical and so haunted by self-destructive thoughts all the bloody time. Just like his mother. There was something in their brains that drove them to hysteria, self-sabotage, misery. Something that tormented them, blinding them to anything positive in their lives.

So he got frustrated and Loki got defensive, just like Hela, and then Odin would scream and they would fight, just like he did with Hela, and then he would smack Loki just to make him see reason.

Just like Hela, he never did.

Looking at Loki, Odin still sees Hela in him, even now. _Especially_ now.

 _Dammit_.

Odin has to clear his throat before he can speak. “You said Hela has been hospitalized,” he begins. “Is she here too?” It’s a good guess because Summerlin Medical Center offers medical care in a lot of specialty areas.

Frigga’s eyebrows hike up once more. “Why?”

“I want to talk to her,” says Odin because, skeptical as he still is of the concept of therapy and all its inherent inadequacies, even he knows that he will never move forward until he has put his past behind him. That he’ll never have a relationship with Loki if he doesn’t let go of old grudges. “I think that I, uh, owe her an explanation and she us.”

Frigga’s face doesn’t give anything away. “She’s in the cancer ward.”

Odin nods and then rises from his chair. Neither of them says a word and he leaves the room, walking all the way from the psychiatric emergency unit in the basement to the cancer ward on the third floor on the opposite site of the building, trying to prepare himself for what he’ll see.

Hela is dying after all, said Frigga, and she already looked miserable enough three months ago when she staggered back into their lives, drugged and very much oblivious to the audacity of her request. He obtains her room number from the nurse in reception and can already hear her coughs from the hallway.

Odin Borson stops for a moment to gather his wits together and then knocks, entering at the same time. Hela is lying in her bed on the side, entirely bald now, squirming in pain, one of her wrists chained to her bed with a Smith and Wesson police issue double lock handcuff. He does feel pity upon seeing her brought so low because slowly dying of cancer is the cruelest of punishments. He had to watch his own mother succumb to it and the agony darkening her features haunted his dreams for months. But, then again, Hela has put her own life at risk ever since she was fourteen years old, steadily poisoning her body with drugs. She might not have to suffer like this now if she’d made better choices in the past.

“Hela?” he asks.

She looks up when she hears his voice, eyes glazed, haunted and lost for a moment, but then recognition washes over her.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Hela snaps, her gaze hardening as she struggles into a half-sitting position to maintain what is left of her dignity. It’s painful to watch and suddenly Odin _can_ see her kid self in his mind’s eye, bouncing up and down the lawn in her bathing suit before jumping into the pool with carefree cheering.

“To put your things in order,” Odin quotes, not knowing where exactly he read it before, “means to put your past in order too, right?”

“Fuck you,” Hela grunts, then coughs. Blood is spraying from her mouth and she furiously wipes at it with her free hand. “Seriously. Get the fuck out of my room.”

Odin holds up his hands, signaling his (mostly) peaceful intentions. “I just want an explanation.”

“Oh really? Since when?” Hela bristles. “You never cared about explanations or my side of ... You … you hated me for no reason ...”

“That’s not true and you know it,” Odin blusters because the resentment is still there and, oh, how fiercely it burns and crackles in the pit of his stomach, so hot and powerful and consuming. “We let you live with us and you showed us zero respect. You sneaked into our rooms and stole jewelry, some of it family heirlooms that had great sentimental value for Frigga and for myself. You—”

“Spare me the lecture, old man,” Hela cuts in but she has not much fight left in her. Another cough rattles her chest. More blood wells up. “I needed money to buy dope and if I didn’t care back then, what makes you think I care now? You’ve always treated me like scum. So, sue me. I don’t give a fuck about the things I stole from your house. You had enough money to replace them and if it’s money you wanna talk about after all this time ... Fuck. Just go.”

“Why did you still need the drugs?” Odin asks, wondering how on earth he could have been convinced even for a moment that having this conversation was a good idea. “I mean, I do understand that I haven’t been as welcoming as I could have been but Frigga … She gave you her everything. She would have loved you, given you a home. And you just … hurt her like that.”

Hela just shrugs. “She is a fucking hypocrite, that wife of yours.”

“Ex-wife,” Odin offers.

Hela chuckles. “Serves you right, old bastard.”

“Is that really all you got? That plastered-on indifference? Is that how you want to be remembered? As someone who hated everyone on principle?” Odin blares because he can’t help himself. He is flaming mad, not at her but at himself because she has a fucking point, and his anger probably hurts him more than it does her too. Was it Mark Twain who wrote that anger was an acid that did more harm to the vessel in which it was stored than to anything on which it was poured? It certainly sounds like it.

“Fuck you,” Hela spits.

“Your eloquence never ceases to astound,” Odin snaps before he can rein himself in, which earns him another death glare. “Listen.” In through the nose, out through the mouth. “I came to talk. To”— _damn_ , _why do these things have to be so utterly impossible_ —“apologize. I know I’ve been a horrible father, to you, to Loki, to Thor even. I’ve been a terrible husband and a terrible human being, especially around Loki. My relationship with your son has always been difficult. I never could bring myself to love him because I always saw you when he looked at me. When those brilliant green eyes met mine, I always sensed your anger, your burning hatred, your desire to hurt me and make me pay for not loving you as my own. I never trusted you, never gave you a chance, like Frigga begged me to. And Loki paid the price. Loki never stood a chance to win my affection. And yes, you were right. I did hit him and I will never be able to take it back.”

“I knew it,” Hela spits, metaphorically and literally, followed by another chest-wrecking cough, leaving no doubts regarding the imminence of her demise.

“And I have paid for it,” says he, swallowed whole by a chasm gaping open in his black, rotten heart.

Hela cackles. “Shit, you really love her, don’t you?” Another cackle, more spit and blood spraying into the air. “Boo-fucking-hoo, Dad.”

“How could I not?” Odin sighs, then turns away. “Look, this was a mistake. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Again, I am sorry for my past behavior, and I really hope for your sake that it will be quick.”

She swallows then, her throat bobbing.

“Goodbye, Hela,” says Odin. He walks away and briefly hesitates when he reaches the door but then he steps through, almost missing his stepdaughter’s response.

“Wait.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does that count as trying? I am not really sure. He's certainly a pro at self-pitying and very self-centered too. Let's see how Hela responds to our favorite MCU Dad's behavior, eh?


	8. An impossibly outrageous proposal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hela and Odin come to an arrangement while Thor is falling for Val. Enamored schoolgirl indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I’ve said before, there’s a fine line between putting trigger warnings and spoiling people or revealing a plot twist, so if you know you’re easily triggered by whatever my whump-craving muse whispers into my ear, please check the end notes before reading. If you want to be surprised instead, just keep going.
> 
> tw for explicit mentions of noncon/child porn bracketed by these little buggers ###

Hela Davis can’t fucking believe that she just called Odin fucking Borson ‘Dad’ entirely by accident. That it just slipped out of her mouth before she could rope it back in and that she kinda sorta MEANT it?!?! Okay, maybe she didn’t _mean_ it but it just came out naturally and not to mock him or anything. Not that she’d ever admit it to ANYONE but in that moment just now ... Hell, he _was_ her father once. She saw him that way and she called him ‘Dad’ when Angie married him in 1992 after Hela’s wife-beating asshole of a scumbag birthfather was sentenced to seven years in prison for arson and they moved from their crappy dump in their crappy high-crime-rate neighborhood into Odin’s suburban palace in Summerlin. She was five back then and, in her naïve little girl brain, her mother had hit the fucking jackpot. Suddenly, Hela had a dad who was wearing suits and drove a flashy car and sent her to a good school and who employed a fucking housekeeper who cleaned up her room and put away her toys for her. A dad who took them to fancy restaurants and to his Florida vacation home and didn’t break things whenever he came home stumbling-drunk and moody. It didn’t matter that Odin acted all awkward around her and that his hugs felt stiff and forced most of the time and that he yelled at her sometimes when she had nightmares or messed up in school because, _fuck_ , she finally had a decent home. And yelling was still better than hitting. Odin was still patient enough. He wasn’t a drunk. He had money. His house was clean.

That was all that mattered to her.

Until everything went to shit when Frigga bloody Fjörgyndottir walked into Odin’s fucking law firm and he never really came home anymore and Angie picked up another wife-beating asshole in a bar to pay Odin back for the affair he kept denying even though it was fucking obvious to everyone, including her ten-year-old self.

She lost everything in 1997, her life, her childhood, the bright future that was promised to her, when Angie moved in with that guy named Greg. Moved into another crappy dump in another crappy neighborhood, dragging Hela along. Greg hooked Angie on drugs and beat her senseless, forcing Hela to spend a great deal of time in her bedroom, crying, shivering and terrified out of her fucking mind.

And Odin? Odin never looked back. He never called, never visited her once. He married Frigga and they made Thor and, just like that, Hela was ancient history. Which is why, scared and fed up and fucking furious, she popped one of the pills her Mom or Greg had left lying around one night when she was thirteen because she thought it wasn’t fair that she was the only fucking one to endure this shit show sober.

She heard an entire choir of fucking angels sing hallelujah that day and never looked back because people hurt other people all the time. Humans are fucked-up. They merrily tear each other’s hearts out, given half a chance. They allow children to wither away in dirt and blood and molding, stinking food. They turn a blind eye to violence, hatred, misery, just because it’s so fucking convenient. But drugs? Drugs calm you down. Drugs aren’t out there to get you. Drugs help you sleep when nobody else will try to make you stop crying or take the pain away. They hug you, make you feel warm, safe, confident. Drugs don’t care what kind of person you are. They are there for you, no matter what. They won’t suddenly turn their back on you. You can’t rely on people but you can rely on drugs. And even if they destroy you and force you to do filthy things, the warming high never judges you. It always feels the same. It always feels _good_ , so fucking good.

That’s how she went by. That’s how she lived, clinging to that sensation, that love, that warmth.

Until she met the kid ... Until he crawled into her bed that night and asked her whether she was lonely, awkwardly hugging her, looping his skinny arms around her wretched, drug-infested body as if he didn’t even care about how tainted she was. As if she could still give him comfort even after condemning him to an almost certain death. How credulous the human species is. It’s fucking disgusting. Pathetic. Downright laughable.

“How could I not?” Odin mumbles before turning away. “Look, this was a mistake. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Again, I am sorry for my past behavior, and I really hope for your sake that it will be quick.”

Hela swallows, her sore throat aching. _Just get it together_ , _you sorry ass whore_. Yes, Odin is an asshole but at least he apologized and was convincingly sincere when he told her he hoped she’d die quickly just now, which, by the way, would be greatly appreciated, THANK YOU. Apart from that, he never violated the kid like she did or allowed Thanos to ... And she has no fucking reason whatsoever to be mad at him for mistreating that boy when she couldn’t even bring her sorry ass sixteen-year-old self to fake love for the hysterical baby he once was either. And if Odin still has love for Frigga in his corrupted heart, maybe he isn’t as cold and ruthless as she always thought he was. Maybe he does have—

“Goodbye, Hela,” says Odin and then walks out on her _again_ , just as he did over twenty years ago and if she doesn’t stop him, he won’t look back this time either. He fucking won’t because who would?

“Wait,” pleads Hela because, apparently, she completely lost her mind after Coulson and that Hill chick left her room the day before. Then again, maybe dying does that to you. Maybe one half of her brain is already roaming the beyond, oblivious to the sheer outrageousness of her request because _what the fucking hell do you even think is gonna happen_? _Do you really think you can just talk to the old brute_? _DO YOU REALLY THINK HE CARES ABOUT YOU NOW AFTER EVERYTHING YOU DID_?

For a moment, she thinks her voice didn’t carry, as raspy as it is now from the constant fucking coughing, and she thanks the last of her lucky star that hasn’t burned out entirely yet, but then the bastard walks back in, shoulders squared, head held high. _Fuck him_.

“What?” Odin asks, his face unreadable.

 _Fuck_. _Friggety fucking fuck in hell_.

“How is he?” Hela brings herself to ask when she finally gets over herself. “Loki? Is he ...” _okay_ , lingers on her tongue for a moment but that’d be downright offensive because how could he be after ... being in that house? She feels sick again but at the same time, she’s in the mood for fucking murder.

“He’s a goddamn mess,” Odin blusters. “He can hardly keep it together. They had to sedate and restrain him twice because he is having flashbacks and keeps hurting himself.”

Hela swallows again and her shredded throat almost explodes. “I’m sorry,” she forces out because she is. She _is_. Even if it never meant much to anyone, least of all herself. Sorry is just a fucking word. It never changes the past and, most of the time, it doesn’t change the future either. Hell, it’s not even meant for the other person, is it? It’s just a lame ass way to make yourself feel better after hurting someone because you know you’ll go and hurt them again at some point because, yes, humanity is cruel like that but, _hey_ , at least everyone always says how fucking sorry they are.

“Loki tried to convince us that you never hurt him but he had a panic attack trying to defend you,” Odin continues, treating her apology as the meaningless interjection that it was. “He almost choked on his own breath and I want to know what the hell happened in LA because he sure as hell isn’t going to talk about it anytime soon and his therapists need to know in order to help him.”

Another swallow, followed by another cough and even more blood. It’s so fucking disgusting. So fucking painful. So fucking humiliating.

“They need to know what triggers to avoid,” Odin blathers on because apparently he’s on a freaking roll now. “Coulson told Frigga about your confession. We know about the prostitution, the drugs, the porn.” He looks disgusted and who the hell can blame him? “But he won’t talk about it, any of it.”

“I’m sorry,” Hela says again because, suddenly, these are the only words she can get out of her mouth. “I didn’t mean to ...” _do fucking what?!_ She has no idea because she hasn’t been thinking clearly since the turn of the millennium. “Did he, uh, ask to see me?”

“No,” Odin informs her bluntly and she tries to ignore how much the kid’s rejection hurts her very core as if she in any way deserved his ... love? Forgiveness? Concern? _Screw it all_. Sobriety still fucking sucks. Sucks worse than before. She’d give everything to get high one more time. To feel warm and embraced and taken care of one last time before the cancer takes it all away. One more time. _Just one more fucking time_.

“Understandable,” she forces out, her voice wobbling.

“Is it?” he asks. “Do you _truly_ understand what you did?”

###

Hela exhales and her breath shudders. Does she? Does she really understand what she did to that child, _her_ child, or has she become so numb to everything that her own actions don’t repulse her half as much as they would a normal human being? She visualizes Loki’s skinny body again, Thanos on top of him, his giant fingers around the kid’s throat, slowly crushing the air out of his lungs, his dick growing harder and harder as he licks his lips, horny as fuck, a glint of greedy pleasure flickering in his pale eyes. She tries to picture it, picture her own son writhing under those hands, pleading, suffering the worst kind of violation. She thinks of the kids in the studio. That seven-year-old girl that Proxima fucking Midnight abducted from the parking lot of a fucking grocery store … That bitch tore a little girl away from her mommy, scared her to death and then put her in a room where some teenager raped her in front of a camera and Hela _knew_ what was going on. Not everything, of course, but she knew and she didn’t do anything. She should have been fucking disgusted by them all but she never felt anything.

###

Never admitted to herself that she pimped innocent kids out with zero fucking remorse.

When Hela thinks of it now, especially of Loki, she does feel things. Shame, anger, disappointment, a strange kind of nausea but most of all utter bewilderment that she turned into such a despicable human being after spending half her childhood cursing far less despicable human beings who seemed like despicable, dangerous monsters at the time.

But none of these sensations is as strong as the urge to blow her fucking brains out with coke one more time.

 _Just one more time_.

It’s like a pathetic lament playing in her head, over and over again, and her entire body is responding to it.

 _Please_ , _just one more time_.

She’d sell her fucking soul including delivery charges if it meant she could high _one last time_.

“I just ... Frigga and I, we just want to know what happened and why,” sighs Odin and isn’t that just the fucking one million dollar question everyone’s been asking themselves. _Why are you so disturbed_? _Doesn’t it make you sick to your stomach, to think he could have been raped and severely beaten_? “I just want to know why you left your own son on our doorstep. He was half-dead, freezing, barely breathing, barely _alive_. Frigga raised him because you couldn’t. She nursed that fragile, little bundle back to health and you never even cared about him until you needed his tissue to keep you alive. I want to know why you let him stay with you, with Thanos, subjecting him to drugs, prostitution and violence. I am aware now of how poorly I have treated you, how badly you needed me when you were younger. And I looked the other way, I did. There’s no taking this back. I’ve had a lot of time to think and I am not proud of my behavior. Far from it. But what you did … You …”

 _You are a horrible person_. _Disgusting filth_. _You don’t deserve anything_. _I treated you like scum because that’s what you fucking are_. _You’re the worst fucking mother who ever existed_ _and that says an awful lot_. Yes, Hela knows this without him spelling it out for her and why the hell couldn’t she have just died in her sleep last night after confessing, sparing herself the trouble?

Because maybe she was just handed another chance to snort herself into oblivion. For good. Because she no longer needs anything or anyone to keep her the fuck alive. If anything, she needs the opposite.

“Please,” Odin begs, his voice softer now, because he has almost breached her defenses and, oh, he knows it, doesn’t he, that fucking bastard, relishes it even. _Smug old grump_ , _so fucking full of yourself_. But even on the brink of death, she still has a few tricks up her sleeve. “I want to know what happened to the two of you. Help me understand our son. _Please_.”

 _Begging now_ , _are we_?

 _Weeeell_.

“I want some coke,” Hela demands.

Odin blinks. “Beg your pardon?”

“A whole lot of coke, if you get my meaning,” Hela continues, coughing again because her organs have turned into a big-league pain in her sorry ass during the past twenty-four hours. “I’m sure you can get access to the evidence vault. And a bottle of Vicodin.”

Odin just stares at her for a few beats before the question she asked between the lines sinks in. “Assisted suicide is illegal in Nevada,” he replies then, ever the lawyer. Of fucking course. “Not to mention that my family has a repu—”

“Oh, cut the crap, okay?” Hela snarls. “One of the first things you asked me when you saw me again was why I wasn’t dead yet. Guess what, old man, I have no fucking clue!” Another cough. Bloody fucking hell. _Literally_ , _ha_. “I probably should be by now and I want to be because dying slowly is beyond fucking painful and if you really want to make amends—which I still doubt by the way but, hey, you never know because he kid grew on me and I never thought that’d ever happen—you’ll help me. You didn’t ‘save’ me back then and, if you’re really sorry about that, save me now. This is your chance. And in return, you’ll get the truth. I think that’s a fair arrangement, don’t you?”

Odin ponders this, his features twisting into a pensive frown as he lowers himself into one the chairs unbidden.

“What about Loki?” he asks eventually. “If I were to agree to his, which I’m not saying I am, I could never be sure how it affects him. I don’t want to cause him any more troubles than I already have and I can only hope that you feel the same.”

“I wrote him a letter,” Hela announces as she jerks her head in the direction of her hospital room nightstand drawer. It’s probably not the most legible piece in existence because her hand wouldn’t stop shaking when she put a pen to paper the previous night but it’s all she got and, _fucking hell_ , it has to be enough. It’s more than she ever received from her own pathetic mother. “And chances are we’ll never get a chance to sort things out anyway before he goes to treatment because, in case you didn’t notice”—she wipes her mouth and shows him her bloody palm—“I don’t have that much time left.”

Odin sighs as if she just made an impossibly outrageous proposal.

 _Oh_ , _wait_.

* * *

“Shit, that was incredible,” Thor wheezes as he collapses into a boneless heap on the bed in Val’s Venetian suite. He feels as weak as a kitten and everything inside him is trembling, shivering, vibrating. Air refuses to stream back into his lungs and he feels like an idiot for gasping so damn loudly but how in the freaking hell could he not? The sloppy, drunken romp in the casino bathroom was _nothing_ compared to this—probably because they didn’t really waste any time at the bar to impair their sexual prowess with booze this time.

Val flashes him a smirk and her face is glowing brighter than a thousand suns. “And this, Mr. Quarterback, is what _I_ am capable of,” she purrs and then tilts her head down to nibble at his lips. She’s a fucking tigress, holy hell, so fierce and no-nonsense and so sure of herself and so fucking beautiful with her dark eyes and her long curls that softly fall into Thor’s face and tickle his cheeks.

Right that second, Thor knows that he’ll forever be at her mercy. “Fuck.”

Her eyes light up. “Oh, yes.”

“Shit, like, I mean, _holy shit_ ,” Thor wheezes again, spewing gibberish like a fucking moron because, apparently, his brain has liquefied along with his skeleton. “And I thought the casino sex was amazing.”

“I was plastered,” Val giggles. “I mean you weren’t so bad back there but I, uh, was already past my limit.”

“Not so bad?” Thor echoes, feeling a hot stab of irrational fear in his chest because, yes, Mr. Quarterback is used to basking in expressions of praise and utter admiration after sexual encounters and never heard a single ‘not so bad’ in his entire life.

“Oh come on,” Val teases him but Thor can tell she’s only half-kidding. “Don’t go all needy on me. I’m not exactly famous for petting oversized male egos.”

 _Ouch_. That girl will be a tough nut to crack but Thor isn’t the type to shy away from a challenge. “I don’t think you ever told me your full name.”

Val chuckles brightly and Thor can’t stop looking at her full lips. His cock tugs again at the memory of those full, wet lips all over his body, her hot breath streaming into his mouth in small puffs. “Trying to bond now, eh?” Gosh, her smile is so hot it could melt butter. “Brunhild Asbjørnsdottir.”

Thor’s jaw gapes. “What? How does that ...” Right, his brain is still pudding.

“My grandmother used to say I was fiercer than the Valkyries and somehow, as it is with childhood nicknames, it just stuck,” she tells him. “It’s my alias in the kickboxing community too. Everyone calls me Val.”

“She was right though, your gran. You _are_ pretty damn fierce,” says Thor. “In bed, at least.”

“Somehow I doubt that this is what my poor old grandma was thinking of,” Val cackles and they both burst out laughing. Thor pulls her close and she snuggles into the crook of his arm, her lips brushing against the skin of his broad, naked chest.

“Can I, uh, ask,” Val begins after a pause of blissful, post-coital togetherness. She has interlaced their fingers and is softly stroking the back of his hand with her index finger. “I mean you absolutely don’t have to tell me if you think I’m overstepping and I absolutely don’t want to pry but I like you and ... Okay, this is awkward, sorry. Never mind.”

“You’re asking me about my brother, aren’t you?” Thor sighs and his heart sinks. _Oh_ , _Loki_. Will his brother ever have something like this? Will he ever be able to let himself go and experience the beauty of giving his body to someone this amazing without thinking about what happened to him? Thor has a hard time imagining it but, then again, he has a hard time imagining Loki having sex, period, which is probably a big-brother-baby-brother thing.

“I shouldn’t have asked.” Val looks away, the slightest trace of contrition in her eyes.

“Do you really want to know?” Thor asks because, even though he doesn’t want to talk about it, especially not right now, if this turned into something vaguely serious after all despite the liquid obstacle of six-thousand miles of ocean between them, he’d have to tell her, right? He’d definitely have to tell her before the two of them ever meet and he’d better test if she can handle it now than discovering that his family is a bit too much baggage after all later.

“He has CPTSD and a dissociative disorder,” Thor blurts out because, _damn him_ , he’ll never stop just blurting things out. “He’s adopted and suffered trauma and abuse as a child because his birthmother was an addict who didn’t really care for him. My Mom raised him but a couple of months ago, his birthmother turned up again and things, uh, escalated a bit.” Understatement of the millennium. “Loki, that’s his name, he ended up living with his birthmother in LA. She’s still an addict, so she’s involved in all kinds of shit”—like child porn, which he won’t say, he just won’t, not to anyone ever, not even Tony Stark—“and Loki has a hard time processing all of it. He’s been self-harming for a while and I don’t think he has it under control anymore. He’s doing it as a subconscious reflex when he feels threatened and they have to restrain him most of the time because his flashbacks are really terrifying but, uh, we’re waiting until a spot opens up in a trauma treatment center in Phoenix, which is supposed to be a really good facility, according to my Mom, so yeah.”

 _There you go_. Longer than he wanted it to be but still concise enough. Thor is searching for Val’s gaze, checking her face for reactions as she silently processes his monologue.

“And I thought my childhood had been crappy,” she mumbles after the conversational equivalent of ten years.

“Why?” Thor asks, his heart picking up a little speed when he thinks of how she told him that she usually stays away from people with too much baggage. He didn’t consider it before but there’s usually a pretty good reason for that, isn’t there? He gulps. “What happened to you?”

Val licks her lips as if to wet them with courage. “My family died in a house fire when I was thirteen. I was the only survivor and I took it hard. Strayed off the path, dropped out of school, lived on the streets for a while, experimented with drugs. That kind of thing.”

_This is how you nutshell, see?_

“I’m sorry,” Thor mumbles and he can’t help but think about how they’d get along if they met. How would someone like Val react to Loki’s episodes, his night terrors, his switching? Somehow, he can’t imagine her walking on eggshells around him, like Frigga did for so long. Loki might benefit from talking to someone like her, someone who went through their own share of traumatizing shit, fought the hardships life threw at her tooth and nail and came out strong enough to build a promising future for herself.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” replies Val. “People who abuse helpless children are the worst fucking pathetic cowards. I despise them.”

“Yeah,” Thor mumbles. He despises Hela alright and if he ever has to see her again, Dr. Fowley’s lame ass breathing exercises won’t do neither him nor her any fucking good.

“But enough sad talk. We have only about three days left before I fly back,” Val announces far too cheerily. “Let’s order some champagne.”

* * *

_A fair arrangement indeed_.

Not in a million years did Hela Davis think that Odin would accommodate her. She aimed into the dark when she fired that shot because she knew that he was the only one ruthless enough to even contemplate the request—Frigga would have been aghast and asking Loki for help wouldn’t have been an option, not even she is _that_ far gone to have considered it—but the old bastard really agreed. It took him a while, yes, but in the end, he totally fucking AGREED.

She has no fucking clue what that says about him and it doesn’t matter. She held up her part of the deal and told him everything. Every fucking little thing. Everything she had on the pornography ring, everything she had on Thanos’s henchmen, everything she did to Loki including almost fucking choking him because he got rid of her dope. She stripped her fucking soul stark naked and gloated over the sight of the old bastard’s composed expression slipping off his usually perfect poker face. Apparently, he did have feelings after all, which was nice to know. They talked for almost three hours until her throat was on fucking fire and then he left, returning with her prize a few hours later. A bag of coke, a cut plastic straw and a bottle of Vicodin. She put it under her pillow and gave him the letter addressed to Loki.

“Don’t read it,” she said, knowing that he would.

“I won’t,” said he. _Liar_.

They said goodbye then. He placed a hand on her shoulder, stiff and awkward as usual, and apologized again. She told him to leave. He did.

And that was it.

Strangely anti-climactic.

Hela doesn’t mind.

It’s night now, finally. The hospital has fallen silent, the buzz outside died down. The nurse won’t come back until morning. Hela pulls out the coke from under her pillow, hands shaking in anticipation. The tips of her fingers trace the tiny plastic bag like a lover’s skin and her pussy throbs hotly. _Oh fucking hell_ , _yes_. She shakes the powder out of the bag and onto the nightstand, which is kinda difficult with one hand but she doesn’t even care. She sloppily forms a line with the back of her little finger and then takes the straw—fucking McDonald’s dammit and here she thought the old bastard had class—and snorts, her heart exploding in her chest and, _oh sweet fucking baby Jesus on a snowboard_ , the tickling in her nose, that explosion in her brain, holy fucking shit, the dope he got her is the actual fucking crème de la crème and just fucking _THANK YOU_ , _DEAR OLD FUCKING DAD_!

Her thoughts take off almost instantly, racing away from her.

Hela’s life in exchange for the truth about what happened to his son. Her son? No. His son.

Frigga will read her ex the fucking riot act! It’s her only regret she won’t be able to see it.

Okay maybe not her only one.

 _Be okay_ , _kid_. _You can do it_. _You’re fucking smart_. _I hope you get the help I never did_.

A crime in order to be able to help Loki recover. Risking his career to finally give Hela peace.

Odin did it for them. For her or for Loki, doesn’t matter. He did it for their bloodline and who the hell uses expressions like bloodline unironically and what does it matter because whatever he did, either one of them was important enough for him to put his cherished reputation on the line. No longer scum, no longer too despicable to deserve basic human decency.

 _Fucking thank you_.

She moves on to the Vicodin even before the coke high ebbed away. Odin got her a full bottle, label removed. Interesting. Well, not really. She doesn’t care one fucking bit. She takes a few and waits to get numb.

 _The kid is safe_. _You can go now_.

Thoughts begin to slip away from her. Everything dulls. Her vision is beyond blurry. She takes the rest before she passes out. All of it, all at once.

 _Fucking bliss_.

She wanders straight into the dream that’s been haunting her for months, wading through those black, deep, stinky waters in utter darkness, lured ever further in with the promise of reaching the deepest point she could never seem to get to no matter how hard she tried in the past because something kept holding her back.

This time, nothing does.

After four-and-a-half overdoses, she is finally there.

She finally made it.

Hela Davis lets go then, allowing the water to suck her under, allowing herself to drown in the blissful, black silence engulfing her.

She is finally free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for suicide/assisted suicide/overdose. 
> 
> Now, where do I start?
> 
> I am aroace, so writing anything romance/sex related isn't something that comes easy to me, so I never know if those scenes come across right because all I can pull from is stuff that I read and not so much personal experience. Maybe I need a beta? If you're interested, please let me know.
> 
> Also, I do not wanna come across as pretending to know exactly what happens to your body when you die of cancer in any way. I rewatched ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ while writing Aftermath and it gave me some ideas and I did some research about kidney failure/kidney disease afterwards to make sure the movie got the basics about leukemia right but I can only do so much. I care more about the psychological than the medical (I think Black Feather can relate).
> 
> Having said that *deep sigh* RIP Hela. You were an amazing character to write and I’ll miss you dearly. I’m sorry my muse didn’t give you a chance to work through your issues and beat your addiction but it’s a struggle not everyone wins. I’m afraid it’s realer this way but we all know you tried in the end ♥
> 
> But oh my. Not me killing off a character after passionately hating on Marvel for making a character’s death seem like THE ONLY acceptable redemption arc for months after the last two chapters of the Infinity Saga *tilts head down in shame* But I gave it a twist and a bit of a spin? Didn’t I? I hope I did. It was my first time too that I ever sacrificed one of my characters, so be gentle. 
> 
> Addiction is a fucking bitch and it changes you but, for some people, it's all they have known for a long time and humans always crave familiarity, even if what is familiar is misery, hurt and pain, we cling to it anyway because the unknown is even scarier. My therapist explained to me that trying to beat an addiction is a bit like trying to leave an abusive relationship. It takes guts and it almost never happens on the first try and for some, it never happens at all. Some just don't survive it.
> 
> Wow, this has gotten so heavy, I apologize. Kinda? But my readers love whump and angst, don't they?
> 
> Ahhh. Let me know what you think please I am really nervous about this ending and about Odin AHAHAAH *hits post button with shaky fingers*


	9. How much can go wrong in a few days?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The answer is: A lot, actually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is quite an unusual chapter I think but I'll talk more about that in the end notes.
> 
> First of all, I wanna thank you all for reacting to Hela's death the way you did. You convinced me that I created a character worth caring for and I'm so grateful you were all so relieved that she finally found peace. It really made me happy to read your comments.
> 
> Now, you think you know pain ...? Just kidding. But Loki is still in a precarious state, of course.

Odin sighs and takes another sip of his scotch. He is on his sixth or maybe seventh drink and the contours of the bar he retreated to after delivering the drugs Hela asked for are beginning to blur at the edges of his vision. She might be already dead by now, and he lent her a hand. He broke the law by doing so but also, and even more importantly, by removing five grams of cocaine from the Senator Brody case evidence and giving Hela a prescription drug in his name. If he got caught, he’d probably be facing theft and distribution charges. He keeps wondering what it says about him that he chose to put his career on the line to help Hela end her misery on her own terms and how others—Frigga mostly, for some reason he suspects that Loki might understand—will respond to his decision. It’s certainly not an easy question to answer. Assisted suicide is legal in some states and illegal in others and that alone testifies to the moral ambiguity of the subject, which has kindled endless debates among advocates of both sides who would bring forth convincing arguments from the socio-psychological, the ethical, the theological and the medical standpoint and everywhere in between.

Odin shuts his tired eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose, which instantly increases his level of intoxication tenfold. His stomach begins to churn and he blinks, trying to get himself back under control.

How utterly weak and beaten Hela looked today, her body hollowed out by cancer and all those drugs. To this day, it remains an utter mystery to Odin how anyone could set out on a self-destructive mission of such a grand scale and never once turn back around, never once contemplate recovery, health, fulfilment.

Be it self-inflicted or not, Hela was in pain, he tries to tell himself. She was in an awful lot of pain. She might have had another couple of days left, maybe weeks, but she would have spent them chained to her bed, robbed of her dignity, slowly devoured by the agonizing pain of a fatal illness because _he_ couldn’t find it in him to give that foul-mouthed teenager she once was a chance. He tries to tell himself it was the least he could do for her after everything she went through because of him. To give her a chance to end her life on her own terms. To make her pain stop because he didn’t end her suffering when he still had a reasonable chance to put her out of her misery.

Would Frigga see it the same way? Or would she fly out of her goddamn mind and right into his face? Would she curse him once more after they finally seemed to have reached a truce after months, maybe even years, of tension, unspoken accusations and nerve-stretching fights?

Odin couldn’t bear this scenario, which is probably why he is still in that bar and not home or in Loki’s hospital room. Yes, Tyr, I still bear the mark of a coward.

And all the things Hela told him about Thanos ... Odin Borson is seething with raw, undignified anger at the mere thought of the Titan’s quick, merciful death after everything he did to Hela, to Loki, to countless innocent teenagers in the LA area. Odin would have sacrificed his right eye to bring that asshole down himself but, alas, what is done is done, or so they say. Truth be told, it gives him very little satisfaction that Thanos is dead. That piece of filth would have deserved far worse than a bullet to the throat killing him instantly, painlessly. He would have deserved a place on death row, forced to live with himself in severe isolation for years, awaiting his demise, forced to contemplate his own monstrosity until the day of his execution. This is wishful, hypothetical thinking at best, yes, Odin knows this. While both Nevada and California still have the death penalty, the authorities haven’t executed anyone since 2006 and, on top of all that, the death penalty in Nevada is only imposed in certain first-degree murder cases. And yet, capital punishment is what lingers in Odin Borson’s befuddled mind because ... The rape kit has been negative, yes, but Hela was still ninety-nine percent sure that Thanos had sex with Loki anyway at some point because _he was his type_ and Thanos _practically undressed him with his gaze the first time he laid eyes upon him_.

 _Loki came onto him real strong too_ , she continued brazenly, which made Odin yearn for brain bleach because how in the ever-loving fuck could a father hear these things and not run berserk? But, dammit it all to hell and back again, even if he ran berserk, it wouldn’t change a goddamn thing because the main culprits are already dead and whoever is left will be hunted down by an LAPD task force after Hela confessed to Detective Coulson and he put the Californian law enforcement machinery in motion.

Justice has been and will be served but, still, it doesn’t satisfy him.

Quite the contrary, he feels guilty. A little filthy even.

Odin has been a lawyer for more than three decades. He defended thousands of people who committed crimes against the constitution and never once did his conscience interfere with his work because he was merely doing his job. Every American citizen has the right to an attorney. Despite what Thor likes to claim sometimes, Odin has never been doing anything illegal. He discovered a goldmine and he exploited it to provide for his family and build a career for himself because that’s what his country of residence is all about, isn’t it? He merely did his job when he defended Senator Brody before his heart attack too and even though the man was a despicable asshole who snuggled drugs into the country that killed millions of innocent people—some of them, a great share of them probably, minors—he had the bloody right to a fair trial.

At this very moment, however, Odin can see the bigger picture for perhaps the first time. Those drugs, they ended up on the streets after having been smuggled into the US from Mexico. People like Thanos got their hands on them and used them to subdue people like his own son to coerce them into prostitution and pornography.

 _What kind of porn did they shoot there_ , Odin almost couldn’t bring himself to ask, the sight of Loki’s bruises forever burned into his brain. Thank God his current client merely committed tax fraud on a gargantuan scale. He is quite certain that he wouldn’t be able to pull through with it if it was sexual harassment or anything else reminding him of the hell Hela put Loki through.

 _BDSM_ , said Hela flatly as if it was perfectly acceptable to call it that when the submissives were minors under the influence of drugs.

Odin is sure he is going to vomit onto the mahogany top of the sticky table in front of him any moment now. He rubs his eyes and pulls out Hela’s letter again. He read it ten times already because even if he told her he wouldn’t, he knew that she knew that he would. And how could he not? How could he not make sure that whatever words tumbled out of a mind beset with agony and withdrawal wouldn’t hurt Loki any more than he has already been hurt?

By now, the lines are blurring in front of his eyes, the scrawled letters veering in and out of focus.

> _  
> Hey kiddo,_
> 
> _I’m not sure you even wanna hear from me and you have every right to burn this thing before even reading it because I am a bad person and, hell, don’t I know it. I treated you like garbage your whole life, even when you were just a tiny, helpless baby that depended on me. And I have no excuse. Drugs were always more important to me than people and I won’t try to apologize or earn your forgiveness. Not because I have no regrets but because I know that an apology doesn’t change anything. It won’t make you better and it won’t undo the past and you deserve more from me than a fucking sorry even if I am. I just don’t think it’s worth anything after all I did. If I weren’t dying, I know I would probably at least try to make amends at this point but I also know I’d fuck up again because drugs were all I ever truly cared about and that still hasn’t changed. I just want you to know that, just because I treated you that way, you aren’t worthless. I treated you the way I did because I’ve always been an addict and never really wanted to do better. Even if I weren’t sick, I’d never be able to be anything else than this. But that doesn’t say anything about you. I wouldn’t have been able to love any other baby or any other less troubled kid more than you. Just know this: You weren’t a punishment. I was talking nonsense that day. I appreciate the time we got to spend together after all and I want you to know that you helped me see a bit more clearly after twenty years of blindly chasing the next high. You were the first person to hug me and you helped me realize that I could still care about another person, even if it was in my own fucked-up, drug-twisted way. I hope you get better after everything that Thanos did to you because I couldn’t find it in myself to help you before it was too late. I really hope you get to live the life I never did._
> 
> _I am grateful to have met you even if I messed it up and it would’ve been better for you if you’d never come to LA._
> 
> _I am selfish too, you see?_
> 
> _I told you many times that you were a pain in my fucking ass and you were, there’s no fucking denying that (and I’m sure you know it because, dammit, you were annoying on purpose sometimes!) but when you weren’t, I did enjoy your company. You’re smart and funny and you see through people and their bullshit. It’s refreshing really and, in rehab, I sometimes caught myself thinking about what could have been, the relationship we could have had. But it doesn’t matter anymore because I don’t have much time left._
> 
> _I could die in my sleep tonight and, after everything, I kinda hope I will. I know from your injuries that you know what that’s like and I really hope you’ll get help before you reach the point where I’m at right now._
> 
> _Be well, Loki. I hope you’ll have a better future. You deserve to overcome this._
> 
> _Bye,_
> 
> _Hela_

Odin still isn’t sure whether and, if so, _how_ her words might upset Loki. He’s been turning the contents of her letter around in his mind for almost two hours now and is still none the wiser. Hela was brutally honest, of course, because, well, when was she ever anything but? _You can’t possibly expect me to sit down at a table with that sorry excuse of a person to munch away on a fucking Sunday roast and act like a family as if you all weren’t a fake bunch of lying cowards that fucked up my life_ , said Loki, on that faithful night. Odin guesses that Loki would welcome her forthrightness but all the rest?

He isn’t at all sure about the rest.

Frigga will know, of course. She’ll handle it. She always did.

And sooner or later he’ll have to face her because the doctors _are_ going to find Hela dead in her bed in a few hours and Frigga knows that Odin went to see her. She’ll put two and two together in no time. And he’ll have to live with the consequences of his decision.

He calls a cab, pays the bill and sways out of the bar, the chilly night breeze almost knocking him over.

* * *

When Thor walks into his parents’ house around eleven the next morning to get fresh clothes, all he wants is a(nother) quick shower that doesn’t leave him hot and sweaty before he visits his little brother again in a shirt that doesn’t reek of sex. He’s raw and sore and sated, drained of every last bit of cum, feeling hot and empty and so fucking full at the same time. His head is still light as hell, _fucking wow_ , and his knees are wobbly. _Holy fuck_. He hopes neither Loki nor his parents will notice the afterglow flushing his cheeks bright pink or that he’s actually limping a little because, _dammit_ , Val is a fucking machine. _Yeah_ , _right_. _Dream on_ , _Thunderbolt_. He’s an open book, always has been, always will be. Frigga will probably gloat and—

Yeah, why did he even bother?

His parents don’t even notice him when he greets them because, surprise, they’re bickering again. Apparently, they just put on a show for Loki’s benefit the previous day.

“She was handcuffed, Odin!” Frigga is shouting, face flushed with anger, arms wildly gesturing into the air. “She certainly didn’t get up and fetch that bottle of pills all by herself! You went to see her! Tell me what you talked about! Now!”

“I went to apologize,” Odin says. He looks like a wrung-out towel with his wrinkled, pale face and his bloodshot eyes. Someone had a few too many last night, _tsk tsk_. “We, uh, got to talk. About Loki. She told me about the Titan’s business, all of it.”

Thor’s stomach dives. Why the hell would Hela have a chat with a man she hated with a fucking passion on her deathbed? Why would she ... This doesn’t make any sense! “Wh-what is going on here?” he finally brings himself to ask.

Their heads snap towards him instantly and they exchange a glance, silently debating whether or not to let him in. Some things never change. “Mom?” Thor prompts.

“Hela overdosed,” Frigga relents eventually.

For a few moments, Thor can’t think.

“She is dead.”

And then, the revelation hits him like a meteor. “But wasn’t she under arrest? How could she ...”

“Precisely,” says Frigga, in a voice sharp enough to cut through diamond, arms crossed in front of her chest, glaring daggers at his Dad.

 _She certainly didn’t get up and fetch that bottle of pills all by herself_.

 _Wait_ ... _What_?! _Fuck_. _Rewind please_.

“I can’t believe you!” Frigga screams at Odin, her eyes brimming with tears now. “I want to know here and now: Did you rob Loki of his chance to say goodbye to his birthmother and get some closure, yes or no?”

 _Whoa_ , _okay_ , _this_ _is so_ _fucked-up but, then again, what isn’t_? Thor is probably banned from having a good time without walking straight into a shit show produced by the House of Odin crushing his spirits immediately after until 2034.

“She wrote him a letter and asked me to give it to him,” his Dad defends himself lamely and then, with visible reluctance, retrieves a folded paper from his pocket and holds it out to Frigga.

“A letter is a communicative one-way street,” Frigga yells. “He won’t get a chance to ask her about any of it!”

Thor doesn’t know what to think. His mind is fucking reeling and the exhilarating hours he got to spend with Val are ancient history just like that. Some deity snapped their fingers and, _wham-bam_ , he’s longer giddy, happy, satisfied. He feels a bit sick actually. He’s terrified for his little brother’s mental state and horrified that his father would ... Okay, maybe he isn’t all that horrified because if his father _did_ help Hela along, which Frigga seems pretty sure of and she’s rarely wrong when it comes to either of them, he did her a fucking favor. Hela would have died _anyway_ , suffering unspeakable pain chained to her bed and wasting taxpayers’ money (and where the fucking hell this last bit came from Thor wouldn’t have been able to tell even if someone had tried to torture the truth out of him), waiting for the inevitable. Hell, she vomited blood in their living room. It’s a fucking miracle she made it this far.

And yet ...

Whatever his Dad did and however questionable it might be from a moral standpoint (and who cares about those anymore these days), what bothers Thor far more is that, just as Frigga predicted, it doesn’t give him any peace of mind at all that justice was served so quickly. Quite the contrary, in fact. It makes him feel like a horrible piece of shit because he’d wished a painful death upon her not forty-eight hours ago. Out fucking loud, with his whole damn chest. In front of Loki.

 _Have a little decency_.

“What did she tell you about Thanos?” Thor asks his father as his mother is skimming the letter.

“I’ll tell you, son, I promise, but not right now. Knowing you,” he sighs and Thor’s fist yearns to crash into his Dad’s face, “you wouldn’t be able to keep it in. You’d be dying to ask him about it and it’d burst out of you sooner or later and I really don’t think that’s what your brother needs from you right now.”

 _Fuck you and your_ _twisted fucking reasoning_.

Thor reads the letter then and his brain almost spins off its axis. “We can’t show him that.”

“Not straight away, no,” Frigga agrees, her face still ashen. “We wait how he reacts to the news of her passing. If he asks, we can still decide. If he doesn’t, we’ll wait to show it to him until he’s in therapy.” She folds the letter away and flicks another glare at Odin. “I can’t believe you’d do such a horrible thing. Just when I thought you’ve changed!”

His Dad looks as if he’s gonna vomit or collapse right onto the floor.

 _Serves him right_.

He doesn’t say another word.

He just leaves.

Thor beats his fucking fists bloody on the punching bag in the gym in the basement before he takes the shower he came for because Odin was right, he doesn’t _want_ to know all the gory details because he knows he wouldn’t be able to handle them— _she confessed to child pornography_ —but it kills him anyway. It kills him to think about what Loki had to endure because he just blindly embraced the possibility that his little brother killed himself. It kills him to think that he could have prevented the worst of Loki’s suffering if he’d waken up earlier, if he’d pressured the cops, if he’d just _fucking done something_!

 _What-fucking-ever_.

This is old news. Get the fuck over it.

Thor takes a shower, gets dressed and then drives to the hospital with his Mom.

* * *

Loki is no longer in restrains. He’s sitting half upright, pale and gaunt, his haunted gaze unfocused, absentmindedly stirring a bowl of soup sitting on his bed tray. Given the notable absence of steam rising from the bowl in whitish wisps, his lunch has already gone cold.

“Hey, honey,” coos Frigga, petting his head. “How are you holding up?”

Loki shrugs. “Okay, I guess. At least I’m no longer tied up.”

“We have to tell you something, brother,” Thor blurts out, as quietly as he can, reaching for his brother’s hand as he sits down. Yes, they agreed to tell him the truth, but Frigga’s composure slips slightly in reaction to his bull-at-the-gate-ish approach anyway.

Loki pulls his hand back and looks at him warily. “What?”

“You’re probably gonna be upset and I’m sorry but, uh ...” The words get stuck. _Way to go_ , _Thunderbolt_.

“Hela lost the battle against her addiction,” Frigga takes over and, _dammit_ , this family is way too good with words, _fucking hell_. If Loki accuses her of lying later, she’ll be able to tell him that, no, no, actually she didn’t and she’d be right. It’s infuriating, really.

Loki stares at them for a moment, his green eyes devoid of any emotion, and then he just nods. “That was to be expected, I suppose,” says he and that’s it. No meltdown, no flashback, no nothing. “I hope she’ll find peace.”

 _Yeah_ , _well_. The part of Thor that still hasn’t shed human decency hopes that too. The remaining eighty-nine percent of him are still beyond fucking angry with that cold-hearted bitch. He tries not to think about Hela though, at least not without Dr. Fowley present to quench the flames of his wrath.

* * *

When Thor meets up with Val again later, he’s still livid. The sex is aggressive and he’s going in like a feral horse but it turns out that she’s actually quite into it. This time, it’s her and not him who crumbles into a boneless heap after he ruthlessly fucked her against the wall.

They spend another amazing night and day together, sipping champagne, eating steaks, talking and fooling around, never really leaving her bed unless utmost necessity demands it.

By the time she walks through security on December 28th, Thor feels it deep in his core that he is actually hopelessly in love. Which sucks of course because of the distance between them but they parted with a long passionate kiss and a promise of regular video calls. _Yeah_ , _right_. _Grow the fuck up_ , _Thunderbolt_ , _and don’t be so fucking sappy_. _It doesn’t suit you_.

* * *

Odin arranges for an ad in the papers and for Hela to be buried next to her mother, one Angrboda Davis. He and Frigga attend the funeral out of sheer duty probably but Thor refuses to go and Leah is out that day, so Loki can’t go either. Thor isn’t sure he would’ve wanted to or even been allowed out to attend a fucking funeral because a funeral is arguably one of the more emotionally taxing scenarios you can expose a trauma patient to. Thor plays matching pairs with Leah as Hela’s body is being lowered into the ground and her joy is so contagious that he even forgets about where his parents are for a while. There is only one other person who came, a woman named Riley, his mother tells him later. _Talk about blowing it with people_. Apparently, Hela and Riley worked the streets together sixteen years ago. Apparently, she was there when Loki was born, which makes him hate her automatically.

* * *

Tony Stark organizes a New Year’s Eve party in his parental home because Howard and Maria flew away to celebrate in Switzerland. It takes Thor’s mind off everything for a few blissful hours filled with booming music, sloppy, carefree dancing, colorful cocktails and bantering with his childhood friends. It’s exactly what he needed and even though he wakes with a hangover the size of a fucking rhino the next day, the memories sustain him for a few days. The whole light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of thing. The promise of a life turning back to normal eventually.

 _Just give it some fucking time_.

He forgot about time zones entirely though and didn’t read Val’s Happy New Year text until a few hours later and when the West Coast finally kissed 2019 goodbye, she wasn’t yet awake or didn’t bother with her phone.

Either way, Thor tries not to think about it because, _hell_ , his brother had to spend New Year’s in the fucking emergency psychiatric unit. He asked his brother if he wanted him to stay, of course, but Loki said he was alright. He said he’d let Leah out because she never saw fireworks before. Frigga told him all about how her eyes lit up as they watched the lightshow on the Strip from a hospital window.

Odin didn’t bother. He buried himself in his case after the funeral and Thor saw very little of him. The cops—and you can never have enough of those poking around your life, really—questioned him of course and Frigga too but, as far as Thor knows, they both denied everything and there wasn’t any fingerprint evidence either and that was it. Apparently, a person like Hela isn’t worth the effort to dig any deeper than utmost necessary.

Thor can’t blame them.

Odin stops by the hospital every day after work but the atmosphere is tense because he and Loki don’t really know how to talk or what to say to each other. The atmosphere between their parents is downright clinical. The atmosphere between Thor and Loki varies from moment to moment, depending on Loki’s state of mind. Sometimes, he pushes him away when Thor walks in, sometimes he asks him to sit and snuggles up to him until he falls asleep. Thor comes to think of his visits as ‘playing Loki roulette’.

He has an inkling that Nikias has returned but he doesn’t have the guts to ask and Loki doesn’t share.

* * *

Coulson and Hill’s interrogation of Loki in the first week of January is a brief affair because no one is going to press charges for either the stabbing or the physical assault on the Interstate and Loki exercises his right to remain silent regarding everything else, sweetly reminding the detective that they had this conversation before. “Whatever transpired in Los Angeles, happened three-hundred miles out of your jurisdiction,” says Loki. “Let LAPD handle it, why don’t you? I am sure there are other families in Clark County that presently deserve your attention much more urgently than ours. Unless your ego is dependent on cracking me open of course,” he continues in a honeyed voice with a trace of poison underneath, to which Frigga sighs and Odin smirks. “In that case, rest assured. You’re not alone. Very few actually succeed with that.”

And that’s that.

It makes Coulson blush and it gives Thor the fucking creeps to see his brother switch from the traumatized bundle that often clings to him in tears to ... _this_. It’s just a mask he puts on in front of those who haven’t seen him at his lowest of course but how he manages to wear it convincingly despite how frayed and brittle his psyche is at the moment Thor has no clue.

Hill caves in to Loki’s constant desperate pleas to go back home then because his vitals are stable enough to not require twenty-four-hour medical supervision anymore and Dr. Wilson has obviously been fooled by the show his kid brother has been putting on for them too. The sly little shit. Thor wonders, not for the first time, why his brother never joined Infinity High’s drama class.

 _He was already being bullied_ , _you moron_.

 _Right_.

“If you agree, of course,” Dr. Wilson says, flitting a glance at Frigga, who nods even before he finished speaking. “If you think you can, uh, handle the responsibility?”

“ _Handle the responsibility_?” Loki echoes, his eyes hardening. “I’m not a—”

“I think I can, yes,” Frigga speaks over him, reaching for his shoulder and squeezing it gently. When Dr. Wilson gives a nod, she searches for Loki’s gaze. “But, honey, if you hurt yourself again and we find ourselves unable to stop you or help you through it, we will bring you back you here to make sure you’re safe. Not because we don’t want you home with us, we _do_ because we _love_ you, but because we aren’t professionals who can—”

“Sedate and restrain me?” Loki snickers. “Yeah, I’m sure that requires a lot of psychological training.”

Dr. Wilson’s face is exasperation made flesh.

 _This is never gonna work_ , thinks Thor.

Hill cocks a brow.

“Alright, alright, fine,” Loki relents in a hurry. “We have a deal.”

Odin is neither convinced nor overly enthusiastic and for once Thor agrees with his Dad but it’s not as if they have a say in the matter. The state has guardianship of Loki until further notice and if Hill says he can go home for a few days until he leaves for treatment on January 13th (yes, they finally have an admission date) and Frigga agrees too (she’ll probably get sole custody of Loki after treatment since their parents will be legally divorced by then, Thor figures), it’s settled.

Loki can leave with them.

 _It’s just a few days_ , Thor tries to assure himself on the car ride home, purposefully ignoring the fact that the way this family handled things in the past hasn’t exactly been a recipe for the blooming of Loki’s mental health. But anyway. _How much can go wrong in a few days_?

The answer is: A lot, actually.

* * *

Loki is tense all the time.

His little brother is a literal stranger tiptoeing through the house, kinda like a walking time bomb, his traumas a constant shadowy presence hovering over him. He has become astonishingly clumsy all of a sudden too, that graceful brother of his. He trips and falls down the stairs. He burns his lips by bringing a hot cooking spoon to his lips without blowing on it first. He drops a glass of water and sweeps up the shards with his bare hands instead of using a dustpan, ‘accidentally’ cutting himself in the process.

Thor can’t tell whether Loki actually believes he’s in any way subtle about substituting razor blades with those rather mediocre ways of hurting himself but he knows better than to draw attention to it. He wouldn’t get an answer anyway. He isn’t delusional enough to believe that anymore.

Loki comes to sleep in Thor’s bed the third night, clinging to him like the five-year-old boy he once was, and he wakes up several times throughout the night, shaking, panting, eyes rapidly filling with tears and unspeakable panic. Thor wraps him up every time, wraps him up as he did when he was younger but there is so much more trauma now, so much more pain, and he isn’t sure it’s enough.

And how the fuck could it be?

Thor is still asleep when Loki squirms in his arms again the next morning. He cradles him closer on impulse but his brother just shrieks and then springs out of the bed as if the sheets suddenly caught fire, his breathing heavy, his eyes huge.

“What?” Thor asks drowsily.

“N-nothing,” Loki pants, his eyes cast downwards, lingering on Thor’s morning wood. “I-I’m sorry. I was just ...”

“I don’t understand,” Thor mutters, his mind still fuddled. Loki knows the drill, doesn’t he? There’s nothing you can do about that growing boner in the ... _Wait_ , urges a voice when his brain finally scrambles at least half-awake. Loki was right there, in his arms. He must have felt ... A supernova of embarrassment erupts in his stomach. “Fuck, I’m sorry, brother,” Thor mumbles, his cheeks and neck flushing hot. “You stay here. I, uh, I’m gonna take care of it.”

He darts towards the bathroom as if his life will be forfeit if he doesn’t reach it in ten seconds.

When he returns, he expects Loki to have retreated to his own room (he probably would have) but he’s sitting on Thor’s bed again, legs pulled up in front of him, arms looped around his skinny knees, rocking back and forth. He’s still panting, still afraid.

 _Fuck_. _Fuck_ , _fuck_ , _fuck_.

“I’m sorry,” Thor whispers even though he is, on some level, aware that he has nothing whatsoever to apologize for. It’s not like he had any hand in the evolutionary development of the male species.

“You didn’t do it on purpose,” whimpers Loki.

Yeah, no.

Thor gently lowers himself back into the bed and pulls Loki close, trying very, very hard to be gentle while simultaneously trying to block out the horror scenarios his baby brother must have gone through in LA, the scenarios that would cause such a violent reaction to a perfectly normal—

 _No_. _Just_ _no._

There is no normal, is there?

 _Get a grip_ , _Thunderbolt_. _You can’t change what happened_. _You can only influence the present moment_. _Get your fucking head out of your ass_.

“I’m here,” Thor murmurs, wishing that his embrace could absorb all the memories of pain and trauma and plant them in his own brain so that he could deal with them instead. “How can I help? What can I do?”

“Nothing,” Loki whispers against his chest. “Just ... Is it okay if we ...” He gulps, sounding even more embarrassed than Thor felt a few minutes ago and how is that even possible. “Can we watch ‘Happy Feet’?”

His favorite, growing up.

 _Of fucking course_ , _brother_ , thinks Thor because, even if he doesn’t care for that flick and never has because honestly who the fuck cares about dancing penguins, how could he deny Loki such a simple thing?

He probably always related to the whole being-treated-as-an-outsider thing. Thor pulls him closer, always closer but still never really close enough, and Loki gives a small sigh.

* * *

Despite his brother’s claims to the contrary, Robin apparently evolved into an independent state of consciousness after all because he fronts later day, demanding to speak to his mother. He isn’t confused as to where he is or who they are though, which is confusing as fuck because Robin still acts like Loki, just with a different attitude towards Hela, if that makes any sense. It doesn’t, of course. Not to Thor. Not without a shrink breaking it down for him.

In any case, Robin-Loki or Loki-Robin descends into a full-blown meltdown when they remind him that Hela is dead. It’s intense but thankfully it’s short too. Loki goes out of his way to tell them that it was nothing to be worried about as soon as he regains control. That Robin isn’t an actual person like Leah or Nikias. “He’s merely a part of my mind that attached itself to Hela because of the circumstances,” he says. “It’ll pass.”

Yeah, _right_.

When were things ever that simple?

* * *

Two days before treatment, Loki is sitting on the couch, crying on the verge of hyperventilation when Thor descends the stairs after taking a shower. Odin is sitting beside him, trying to calm him down.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” wails Loki as he presses his thumbs into his eye sockets to make himself stop crying.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” Odin tries. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

Loki just gasps for breath, whimpering.

“Tell me,” Odin says again and, when no answer comes, he grabs him by the shoulders, shaking him far less gently than he probably intended. “Just tell me what I can do!”

Yes, their father is trying alright when he’s around but he’s still far from composed.

“Dad, stop,” Thor chimes in, putting his arm around his brother’s skinny, shaking shoulder to shield him from Odin’s temper. “What is it?” he asks Loki.

Loki draws a long, shuddering breath but he is losing control over himself. He whimpers for a while before he can speak and even then, his words come out strangled between gut-wrenching sobs. “When is Mom gonna be back?”

Thor has no fucking clue what to make of _that_ and glances at his Dad, silently demanding clarification.

“She went to get groceries,” Odin tells him, exasperated. “How am I supposed to know when she’s going to be back? She only left twenty minutes ago!”

Another tremor runs through his brother’s body and Thor still has no idea what the hell is happening right now. “Loki?” he asks in a whisper but his brother just mewls.

“Get a grip, son,” shouts Odin. “She’s just getting dinner!”

“Dad,” whispers Thor. “Please. Don’t yell.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Odin mutters under his breath and then he stomps off, irritated and fucking fuming because, well, anger is so much easier to deal with than helplessness and the overpowering frustration that comes with it. Welcome to the inner circle of the therapeutically enlightened.

Whatever _this_ is, though, it reminds Thor of the breakdowns Loki suffered as a child when he didn’t know where Frigga was. Maybe he isn’t even Loki right now even though it’s hard to tell. For all Thor knows, he could have interacted with twenty different alters already even if the only ones he can clearly identify at this point are Leah, Nikias and Robin. But there’s always a chance Loki isn’t Loki because would Loki really break down like that just because Frigga went to the fucking grocery store?

He’s sixteen, dammit.

Not bloody likely.

“Hey,” whispers Thor, his mouth brushing against Loki’s hair. He tries to think of all the things he said to him when he was a helplessly overwhelmed child dealing with his hysterical toddler brother screaming for his mother. “She’ll be back soon, okay? I promise you. She wouldn’t just leave us here. She’s just making sure we get dinner. You’ll see. She’ll be home soon.”

“You can’t promise that,” Loki (?) howls.

“Of course I can. What’s gonna stop her from coming back here?” Thor asks, pulling his little brother even closer.

When they were kids, Loki never had an answer to this but now he has a whole battery of them, which makes Thor question whether he’s really dealing with a child right now. “She could get into a traffic accident,” he whimpers. “There could be a terrorist attack or a hostage situation in the grocery store. She could have a sudden heart attack like Dad or a stroke. She could—”

“These things aren’t very likely,” shushes Thor.

“Yes, they are! They happen every day! What if she never makes it home?” Loki wails, big fat crocodile tears spilling out of his eyes by now. “What if she ... You wouldn’t ... What if we have to say goodbye? I don’t wanna say goodbye.”

“You won’t have to,” Thor assures him even if his stomach is taking a plunge at the thought of a life without his mother in it. “I promise you that, okay? Mom will be here. She will. She won’t die or anything.”

“Hela did,” Loki whimpers. “And she wasn’t even that old.”

“But Hela poisoned herself for years,” Thor tries again. “Mom is healthy. She eats right and even exercises sometimes. She’ll be fine.”

When Frigga returns home eventually, Loki hugs her so fiercely that she topples to the floor, hurting her tailbone.

* * *

The next night, they’re finally packing for treatment, which turns the house of Odin into a battlefield of screams and tears and flying accusations once more. Frigga already did her own packing. In contrast to Thor, who needs to get his lazy ass back to school to catch up with all the material he missed after his surgery and thus can’t possibly live anywhere near Loki in the foreseeable future, Frigga found herself a small apartment in Phoenix that she could rent on short notice online. Because, _surprise_ (not), there is no way in hell she’d let Loki move to another state without her close by. Thor adores her for it even if he is still kinda jealous at the same time.

“I don’t fucking care!” Loki howls for the hundredth time when their mother holds up one of his favorite pajamas.

“How about I’ll just pack for you,” suggests Frigga, with the patience of a fucking saint. “If there’s anything you need later, I’m sure your father will send you whatever you need, okay?”

“Sure,” says Odin.

“What I need is for you to _not_ send me the fuck away!” Loki howls and then storms out of his own bedroom, making a dive for Thor’s, where he curls up on his brother’s bed and breaks down crying. _Again_.

Deep breaths, Thor tells himself. _In through the nose_ , _out through the mouth_. _Ten times_. _Identify what led to your anger_. _Anger is just a protective shield masking rawer_ , _less manageable emotions_. _You_ _need_ _to address what lies underneath_. Helplessness is what fucking lies underneath, alright? The crushing realization that his brother won’t let him help. That he’s no longer twelve and Loki is no longer seven and no longer blindly trusts in his protection because Thor fucking turned away at some point!

Deep breaths. _Yes_. Deep, deep breaths.

It’s not _about_ that, you fucking moron.

Loki is hurting and it’s not his goddamn fault. Loki can’t help it, okay? _Just calm the fuck down_ , _Odinson_. _You won’t be able to help him if you flip your lid_.

Thor waits a few minutes before he goes to comfort him with lame promises regarding the benefit of treatment but, _no fucking surprise there_ , Loki won’t have any of it. Thor can’t blame him. Can’t blame him for screaming and spitting and sobbing. Eventually, he just has to fucking admit defeat and so he retreats out of his own room, leaving Loki to it.

“One more night,” says Odin, squeezing his shoulder in the hallway. “It’s just one more night.”

 _Fuck you_ , Thor wants to scream but, then again, his Dad is right and he _knows_ it. Neither of them could do this for very much longer and he is no longer as fucking full of himself as he was a few months ago when, despite Tony Stark’s claims to the contrary, he stubbornly clung to the illusion that he could fix Loki. He knows now that he can’t. Not after LA. Not after Hela’s confession.

This is bigger than Thor, bigger than them.

* * *

When they check in on Loki later, he’s ... actually freaking high.

Which, of course, sends Odin flying off the handle, despite his best efforts. He grabs Loki by the shoulders again and shakes him before Thor can pull him off his brother. “Where did you actually manage to find drugs in this house? Why did you have to ... You lived with Hela!”

“Odin,” admonishes Frigga.

“You saw what this shit does to people! Why would you ... Just ... I just want to _understand_!”

 _Don’t we all_?

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Loki slurs, his eyes dead and empty.

“No, I don’t,” comes Odin’s clipped reply as he tries to get himself under control using the breathing exercise Thor had taught him and what a miracle it is that his old man even listened to him in the first place! “But you don’t know what it’s like to live with a self-harming, suicidal child either, so I suppose that makes us even!”

“Odin,” hisses Frigga and Loki just grunts.

“What and how much did you take?” Frigga urges softly, taking Loki’s hands in hers. He jerks away. “If you don’t tell us, we’ll have to get you to the hospital. You know that, right?”

Loki debates with himself for a few moments before he wordlessly opens Thor’s nightstand drawer and pulls out a half-full bottle of Vicodin that was prescribed to him _two whole years ago_ when he dislocated his shoulder in the final game in the 2017 season when the Wolf Pack kicked the Rebels’ asses in Reno. He took them for a while but then stopped because he had the eerie suspicion that those pills were impairing his libido.

 _Dammit_.

“You’ve been taking these?” Thor asks, reaching for the bottle. “Aren’t they expired already?” They aren’t but still, he feels guilty that his vanity caused him to leave something lying around that Loki could use to self-destruct even if there was no way in fucking hell he could have known that this was gonna happen back then.

“Well, if you, dear brother, had taken them as instructed they wouldn’t be here now, would they?” Loki snarks, itching for a fight. “But you probably prided yourself on the ability to take the pain like a man!”

“No actually,” Thor harrumphs, “I couldn’t get it up with them in my system, so I—” He shrugs the rest.

Loki’s eyes go wide and then he screams before melting into the floor in a heap of tears.

“How many did you take?” Frigga urges him, patting his back and then turning to Thor when Loki gives no answer. “How many did _you_ take?”

“About half of it, I guess?” Thor mutters, then shrugs. “How am I supposed to remember ... Shit ... I just ... I’m sorry, Mom.”

 _Isn’t he always_. _Not a fucking thing he can do right when it comes to the baby brother he’s supposed to protect_.

“Loki,” urges Frigga after assuring him that it’s alright. _Al-fucking-right_. _If only_.

“Four,” Loki whimpers. “I’m sorry ... Don’t ... don’t send me away, please. Don’t. Don’t send me away.” He’s full-on howling at this point. “I wanna stay. Please.”

They all exchange a glance, silently debating what to do.

“Brother,” Loki sobs. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be,” Thor replies, kneeling down next to him, squeezing his shoulder. “Hey. You’re doing the best you can and we all know it. Please, don’t apologize.”

Loki climbs into his arms then, draping himself around him, hugging him as if his life depended on it.

Sometimes, thinks Thor, it actually might.

Odin walks out then, huffing and grunting to himself under his breath, and Frigga looks hopelessly lost, hopelessly overwhelmed.

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Thor promises his mother because, yes, his protective big brother instincts are ganging up on him again. _She’s done so much_ , _hasn’t she_? they whisper. _She tried to deal with this all by herself after you moved out and she fucking deserves a break_. “I’ll tell you if we have to call nine-one-one.”

Frigga nods, her face awash with gratitude. She kisses the top of his head and then she takes her leave as well.

Thor picks his little brother off the floor and is again thrown by how weightless he feels in his arms. Val probably has twenty pounds on him, if not more. Loki is still clinging to him when Thor lies down with him, still whimpering softly and Thor just holds him until his brother finally falls asleep. Even when he can be sure Loki won’t wake again, he doesn’t have the heart to get up. He just cradles him close, trying to make himself fall asleep despite the early hour.

 _One more night_.

 _Just one more night_.

After all the times he wasn’t here, it’s the least he can do.

* * *

Loki tries everything in his power not to cry or sulk or scream into their faces the next morning but, despite his best efforts, he doesn’t succeed. First he sulks when they wake him up, then he sobs when he realizes that Hill is going to ring their doorbell any time soon and then he screams when she actually does. He sulks and sobs and screams some more when they try to usher him to Hill’s car, followed by vitriolic accusations of the ‘If you truly loved me, you wouldn’t sent me away again’ variety. Odin leaves the parlor then to relocate the volcanic eruption of his anger to a safe place and it takes a whole lot out of Thor to keep a lid on his own temper and not storm away after his Dad.

He is fairly certain he is fully deserving of the worst brother in the universe award when Hill’s car packed with Frigga’s and Loki’s most important belongings finally pulls out of the driveway after Loki stubbornly refused to hug him goodbye and a tsunami wave of relief floods through him. Not dread, not sadness, not anger, not disappointment, no.

 _Relief_.

Relief to see Loki being taken away. _Away from him_ , _away from his protection_. Dr. Fowley told him he didn’t need to, _shouldn’t_ , feel guilty about it but what does she really know? She’s been helpful with some things—Thor can’t deny that because chances are he would’ve destroyed more things and hurt more people without her guidance—but she’s wary of Loki, of his condition, of their fucking relationship. She called it unhealthy more than once. _Screw her_. He just had to say goodbye to his utterly devastated baby brother who is leaving for treatment almost exactly three-hundred miles and a five-hour drive away with Maria Hill and their mother and Thor just _knows_ he should feel bad. No matter what his shrink said, he shouldn’t be fucking relieved.

Or should he?

 _You listen to me_ , _Champ_ , Tony Stark’s words echo through his skull. _You did everything for that little pain in the ass_. _You did much more than any other big brother would have ever done_. _You can’t fix Loki and it’s not your job to fix him_. _He needs professional help_.

Thor knows this.

He _does_.

Fucking hell, if he _weren’t_ relieved that Loki is finally getting real help, he’d be a first-class asshole, right?

Maybe.

Thor draws a deep breath and then walks back into the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I went from contemplating Odin's decision in detail to suddenly speeding the narration up so that I can finally send Loki to treatment by the end of this. It's nothing I usually do but I think it worked out in the end. Please let me know if you think otherwise.
> 
> Special thanks goes to Anke for helping me with the bits of Thor's POV dealing with what he got up to with Val and to Georgia for suggesting Happy Feet as Loki's favorite movie growing up. I'm sure he would have loved it ♥♥
> 
> And yes, Thor has been paying attention in therapy and even if the coping mechanisms of this entire family are still debatable at best, they're still making slow progress. Change doesn't happen overnight, eh?
> 
> That said, the next chapters will finally focus more on Loki and his time in the treatment center, the therapy sessions, family therapy etc. 
> 
> See you all soon x


	10. And what now, Loki, hm?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki arrives at the treatment center.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you might have imagined, going to treatment isn't fun, especially when you're a teenager. It turns your fucking world upside down. So beware, bag of cats, can of worms, minefield, whatever you wanna call it, Loki's mind is all over the place and it shows. He is a complete mess, he's hurt and confused but he's also a self-entitled, bratty, stubborn little shit. So yeah, rough start ahead.
> 
> I'll put specific trigger warnings in the end notes so that you can take a look if you think this'll be overwhelming because it's gonna be tough but I also don't wanna spoil anyone. References to what happened with Thanos in LA are neither graphic nor specific.
> 
> That said, enjoy the angst fest!

**_Mid-January_ **

**_About three and a half months after the incident_ **

_Wow, you’ve truly done a marvelous job pulling yourself together out there_ , grumbles Nikias as Frigga slides onto the backseat cushion next to Loki and shuts the car door, trapping him in this lovely Child Services vehicle. _You despicable cry-baby_.

“Shut up,” he mutters under his breath but, apparently, not quiet enough.

Frigga raises an eyebrow at him and Loki turns away from her, giving her the cold shoulder. A part of him knows that she wants him to get the best help available for traumatized little screw-ups like him in the US of fucking A because she loves him but that part is a tiny, faintly chirping mouse while all the other parts of him are horrific beasts screaming from the top of their lungs. The part that feels utterly lost, abandoned, without guidance. The part that is constantly hurting, always on the verge of explosion or implosion, like a newly discovered, unstable element teetering on the brink of unleashing a nuclear catastrophe upon the world. The part that feels the cold, sharp blade of betrayal being thrust into his stomach and then twisted, twisted, twisted, again and again, in every waking second. The part that longs for his mother and brother, drowning in that longing, choking on it. The part that is outright terrified by the prospect of waking up in a bed, alone, with no one to hold him tight and warm him up when the cold spreads from that deepest, darkest pit of despair inside of him during the night. All those parts of him are hollering in hoarse, raw, ugly voices, shouting the helpless, inconsequential little mouse down.

Frigga’s palm lands between his shoulder blades and his heart gives a lurch of joy.

 _Oh_ , _that feels nice_ , _doesn’t it_? comments Nikias. _Being coddled by your mama_. _Savor it while it lasts_.

Loki wants to scream.

He swore to himself that he wouldn’t listen to Nikias anymore because that bastard only creeped back towards the cave sometime after word got around inside that they were out of Thanos’s line of fire forever and ever and, _dammit_ , Loki still can’t put into words what he felt when he learned that Hela had shot him in cold blood. He was relieved sure but he was shocked too and the filthy little wretch he is deep inside might have even grieved a little, mourning the titan’s rough touch, his battering fists, the humiliation, the pain; sometimes electrifying, invigorating, sometimes numbing, soothing, but always so, so sweet. It’s all gone now and he won’t ever get it back and how sick is that, that he actually _misses_ the house and the clients and what they did to him sometimes even though he’s having night terrors and flashbacks from it all to the point where, _how fucking embarrassing_ , he lost his freaking shit just because he felt Thor’s dick go hard against him in the morning as if he actually forgot that his brother’s penis is leading a life of its own and how much sicker than _that_ is it that the news of Thanos’s death hit him harder than the news of Hela’s death, _whoaaaa_ , _hold it_ , _let’s NOT go there_ , that’s a huge can of worms, it’s an actual fucking silo filled with worms the size of boas, _JUST NO_.

Where were we?

Right.

Nikias, despised king of the realm of never-ending misery, fled into the jungle even if he was the one who let Thanos into their personal space to begin with and then just fucked off for months after blaming Loki for doing the exact same thing. Yeah, right. He’s fucking twisted, that sonofabitch, and a bleeding coward at that. Of course it’s hard to ignore someone who’s talking to you inside your own goddamn head but since Loki started ignoring Nikias when he went on and on about Thor after his undesired return, things got a little better because, hell, even Nikias had to admit at some point that Thor cares; at least at the moment.

Yes, _oh wonder_ , even Nikias couldn’t deny that Loki had his old big brother back for a few blissful days. Thor never really left the house except for his morning runs. He sat with him for hours, endured his tantrums, cuddled him, even watched stupid Disney movies with him ( _whiny little baby_ ). He held him at night, made him feel warm and safe, keeping the shattered pieces of his mind and soul in place inside his strong arms, his protection, his Thor-ness, preventing Loki’s fragile essence from crumbling into a heap of broken pieces.

And now, it’s all over again. When he wakes in the middle of the night from now on, hungering for Thor’s protection that makes everything okay for a little while, Thor won’t be there anymore and he’ll crumble, one tiny bit at a time. Thor will go back to law school and he’ll go back to playing football and he’ll forget about his crazy kid brother again and things will go back to the way they were before and he’ll only come visit maybe five times a year and Loki will be alone again, sinking through his mattress into a black pit of agony night after night, with no big brother beside him to anchor him to sanity with his deep, soothing voice.

An invisible weight crash-lands on Loki’s chest, crushing the air from his lungs. He draws a shaky breath that absolutely has to transform itself into an ugly sob on the way out.

“Hey,” murmurs Frigga, rubbing slow, gentle circles across his back.

Loki craves her touch but jerks away all the same because he has to get used to it, doesn’t he, he has to fucking practice to be alone again, to live without their affection, gods, that word, _alone_ , it’s so, so ugly and terrifying, _a-l-o-n-e_ , that smothering darkness hovering over his head, inside his very core, just fucking everywhere.

Frigga sighs as she draws her hand back. He’s crushing her spirits again, of course. _Tainted little piece of filth from the street_ , _addict_ , _son of a fucking whore_. She couldn’t even deal with him after he popped Thor’s pills. She walked out of the room _just like that_. She was probably disgusted, disappointed. Thank God Hela is dead, Loki thinks sometimes, which is downright horrible even considering what she did to him on his fucking birthday and utterly irrational too, but, then again, if she were still alive, Odin might still send him back to live with her after she spoiled him. He can’t do that anymore. LA is off the cards and there’s that much at least (well, kind of, _but we’re not going there, remember?_ ). He won’t have to go back there. Odin can’t make him because that ‘there’ no longer exists.

 _Oh come on_ , _you’re being ridiculous_. _They’re divorced_. _Odin can’t do anything to you anymore_.

Shit.

They really broke up. His parents—adoptive parents—really got a divorce. It’s still hard to believe and it’s so goddamn exhausting to be forced to think about all these horrible things like death and divorce and families breaking apart and about things that just end without prior warning and lives that won’t ever be the same again, no matter what. Thor will be twenty-one in April. He’ll be a whole-ass adult, at least on paper, and he might move to San Francisco for his career soon if the scouts fall for him like everyone else does. Frigga rented an apartment Arizona. They talked about selling the house in hushed voices. They won’t ever live together in their Vegas home again. _Ever_. And no matter how often his Dad flipped his fucking lid, the thought of never living with his father again in the constellation he grew up in weighs Loki down and fills his mind with a paralyzing bleakness because ...

 _Because what_?

Because if Thanos and Malektih and the Maw won’t hurt him anymore and if his Dad won’t hurt him anymore and Thor won’t hurt him anymore, then who the hell will?

 _Whoa_ , _that’s fucked-up_ , _isn’t it_?

 _Yeah_ , _what’s new_?

Loki tries his damnedest to fold in on himself. If only he could disappear. The inside of the car is suffocating him and Loki almost feels as though his brain and his organs were shrinking and cracking and crumbling into a heap inside him, leaving nothing but an empty shell.

Oh, how badly he craves another pill, a tumbler of scotch, anything to make it stop. He begins to squirm, against his will, trying to scratch the itch.

It helps shit.

He silently prays that they’ll put him on a regime of pills that’ll send his conscience floating far afield, preferably into his safe space. He has no clue how else he’s supposed to survive this, any of it.

By the time they pass Kingman, not even half the journey behind them, Loki is already convinced that the grueling depths of Dante’s hell would be easier to endure than being stuck in this car. Particularly since Frigga started talking to Maria Hill, making actual conversation as if they weren’t out and about for the sole purpose of expelling Loki from the world of the sane and civilized.

He bangs his head against the window. He should have jumped over that damn banister of Thanos’s balcony. Why didn’t he? Why the fuck did he second-guess himself?

 _Because you’re a coward_ , snaps Nikias.

 _As are you_ , Loki snaps back.

This is hopeless, isn’t it? It’s fucking hopeless. At least having a multitude of mental issues to battle against twenty-four-seven is so draining and so exhausting that sleep is always an option. Loki closes his eyes and withdraws deeply into himself, retreating to that place where his thoughts and emotions blur into one another and create the fuzzy ephemera that chase his terrified mind through the gloomiest of night terrors. 

* * *

Frigga gently shakes him awake and Loki blinks, then rubs his eyes. Popping Vicodin the previous night has been a terrible idea, _duh_ , and he’s still paying for it. His head is pounding. His mouth his dry. And his heart ... does a cartwheel before it plunges from his chest into his stomach and from there into his feet and through the fucking floor and into the netherworld when his surroundings register.

They have arrived.

Cursed father of hell, they’ve actually fucking arrived.

There’s the treatment center and it looks ... exactly like all the other fucking treatment centers he has seen all over television in his life. A giant guarded parking lot (which makes it even harder to escape, is the first thing coming to Loki’s mind when he glimpses the guard in his fancy uniform), a gray-bricked, flat-roofed building with high windows trying very desperately to look modern, double glass doors, a lobby with a check-in desk and a waiting area, potted palm trees and horrendous art on the pastel walls.

Yeah, how about no?

Everything inside of Loki tenses up when Frigga and Hill walk to the receptionist and he nervously glances around, seeing all those people scurrying around like fucking ants, so many people, which, by the fucking way, is the reason they didn’t fly over here in the first place. Just thinking about all the foreign people being so unbearably close to him in the crammed space of a fucking plane gave Loki half a dozen anxiety attacks in rapid succession but now that he’s here, there are all these foreign people too, patients, doctors, nurses, and he winds himself up visualizing how he’ll have to coexist with them in this building for an indefinite amount of time, winding himself up until he’s as taut as a spring, _fuck_ , _fuck_ , _fuck_ , he’ll have to share his fucking meals with them, maybe even a room, OH MY FUCKING GOD, HOW COULD HE EVER FUCKING SHARE A ROOM WITH ANOTHER PERSON, okay, _deep breaths_ , _deep breaths_ , holy fuck, why didn’t he _think_ about this before, keep breathing, can’t breathe, no air, can’t stay.

 _Damn right we can’t_ , agrees Nikias.

Loki turns on his heel and blindly makes a run for it.

He doesn’t get far.

A guard catches him as soon as he’s bolted through the glass doors, grabbing him by the wrist as he darts frantic glances in each direction. It takes of all Loki’s strength and then some to keep himself from screaming and stop the tears from spilling out of his eyes. He isn’t sure he’s succeeding because his vision is whitening at the edges, he’s losing control dammit, even if he’s not entirely sure who’s trying to take over. Hopefully not Nikias but, then again, the bastard hasn’t dared to come back out again so far and why the hell should Loki even care? His life is ruined anyway and there’s nothing that could possibly make it worse. The guard ushers the whirl of despair and tears and shouting he’s been reduced to in a matter of seconds back inside and the look of inconsolableness on Frigga’s face slices deep into his core as easily as a knife cutting through soft butter.

His stomach clenches but, soon enough, he can feel his feelings towards her slipping away from him.

Robin.

 _Oh_ , _no_.

 _Not now_ , _please_.

 _You shouldn’t even be alive_. _I am you_. _Get the fuck out_.

Everything is a haze after that. The voices, the corridors, the people.

They sit down in Dr. van Dyne’s office after a while. She looks the same, affectionate blue eyes, genuine smile and everything, but her words don’t really reach his brain no matter how hard Loki tries to de-numb himself and anchor his mind in the present moment. He’s half there, half in the jungle, and his head has turned into a fucking spintop, breaking the image of the room into a million pieces and melting them into a blur that leaves him all kinds of dizzy.

 _I want to go home_ , _please_. _I just want to go home_.

He’s sure he’s gonna pass out.

 _Why isn’t everyone fucking doing anything_?!

“There’s something I need to get off my chest,” Frigga announces at some point, sounding vaguely contrite. Her voice comes from far away. “He, uh, found some prescription meds in his brother’s room and got high on Vicodin last night. I know I should’ve probably called but he pleaded with us to let him stay for the last night and I didn’t ... I didn’t have the heart to tell him ‘no’.”

“I see,” says Dr. van Dyne.

 _No_ , _you don’t_. _You bloody fucking don’t_ , thinks Loki.

“Thank you for telling me.”

 _Yeah, thanks for snitching on me_.

It’s all so fucking unreal and who are those people anyway to decide what’s gonna happen to him ... who or what gave them the right ... Where is his fucking mother ... _Hela died_ , _honey_ ... A blow of grief fells him like a tree and then a chasm opens up inside of him, swallowing him whole. He is alone. His mother is dead, forever gone, taken away by drugs and cancer. That is why he’s here because the state ... If only he could go after her ... No, _just fucking wait_ , Hela is _not_ his Mom, is she? Frigga is and she’s getting him help ... Help he neither wants nor deserves because he’s such a hopeless, filthy piece of street dung ... Why is everything so fucking blurry? Why do their voices sound so muffled?

Time speeds by and drags on at the same time.

For fuck’s sake, can someone get him a drink?

“Loki?”

He forces himself to return to the moment. They’re standing now, all of them. Hill, Dr. van Dyne, Frigga, their faces twisted in alarm.

“Y-yes?” Gosh, how wobbly his voice is.

“We’re going to get you checked out,” says Dr. van Dyne.

“I-I’m fine,” Loki rasps.

“You’re not,” the shrink goes on. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? We’ll take good care of you, I promise. Now, it’s time to say goodbye to your mother.”

 _No_.

 _No_ , _no_ , _no_ , _noooooooooo_ , cries one of those parts from deep within him, an ugly, throaty, tear-choked roar. A millisecond later though, it lapses into silence again. A millisecond later, he doesn’t even know why he’s so upset. They walk out of the office.

“Goodbye,” he says, leaving Frigga dumbfounded.

She pulls him into an embrace or tries to anyway. He jerks away. “I already said ‘goodbye’ just now, didn’t I?”

Her mouth gapes.

 _How dare she_? _She’s just his guardian_ , _for fuck’s sakes_!

Robin takes a step back for emphasis. “I guess I’ll see you?”

Frigga doesn’t know what to do with that but Dr. van Dyne just nods at her, a cryptic gesture loaded with meaning he can’t be bothered to decipher at the present moment and, after a few beats, she nods back. Maria Hill reaches for her arm then and gently leads her away, walking her towards a set of doors at the end of a corridor.

 _Mama_.

She’s gonna leave him. His Mom is gonna fucking leave him here and the shrink said she won’t be able to contact him for a while to let him settle in or maybe he just dreamed that but, _holy fuck_ , she’s walking away, Frigga is fucking leaving, he can only see her back, and he’ll have to stay here without the warmth of her hugs, without her reassuring smile providing the last faintly glimmering light in even the blackest of hours, without—

“Mom!” Loki shouts.

Frigga wheels around instantly, her face awash with love, so much fucking love she’s damn near bursting with it.

Loki orders himself to keep it together because there’re people watching, _for fuck’s sake_ , even if he didn’t notice them before; other patients, a nurse walking by, Dr. van Dyne, Hill. It doesn’t matter. The floor cracks open beneath him like ice on a river and he sprints towards her, arms and legs pumping, runs to escape the undertow of water but the creak is following him and he just _knows_ he won’t be safe until he reached her because, so help him God, if he doesn’t reach her, he’ll fucking sink and he’ll drown miserably and ... _Don’t break down_ , _you hear me_? _Don’t break the fuck down_!

“Don’t go,” wails Loki as he throws himself into his mother’s arms. “You can’t leave me here.” Panic, unspeakable panic, gripping his heart, squeezing it. Everything is cold, so, so cold. He’s gonna fucking freeze from the inside. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me alone, please! Don’t go!”

 _I said don’t_.

“Oh baby,” sobs Frigga, cradling him close. “Believe me, I don’t want to. I wish I could take you back home with me but that’s not an option right now. You know it’s not.” Her mouth is on his head, whispering into his hair. Loki hugs her close with everything he’s got, his fingernails digging into her back. “I’ll visit you as soon as I can. I’ll visit you every day, I promise. I won’t be far.”

Loki howls. He just fucking howls, reduced to a pathetic puddle of childish needs. “You can’t leave me, Mom.”

She makes a guttural, unidentifiable noise halfway between a sob and a sigh. “I’m sorry, Loki, but—”

“Noooo,” he screams and it comes from this place deep within him, a frozen wasteland withering away in icy darkness. “Mom, please! You have to take me _home_! I’m gonna die here!”

There’s another pair of hands on him now, pulling him away, and he lashes out, punching, kicking, thrashing. _It’s not rational_ , cautions a tiny sliver of consciousness that’s still somewhat operational in the eye of the emotional shitstorm he’s currently trapped in. _You’re making a fool of yourself_. _You’re sixteen years old_. _Just get it the fuck together_ , _smurf_.

Loki tries to breathe but chokes on a sob, Dr. van Dyne’s hands on his shoulders, trying to steady him. Frigga’s face, blurred by his tears, is a grimace of utter, heart-crushing misery.

“It’s time,” says Dr. van Dyne.

“I love you, honey,” murmurs his Mom. She cups his face with her hands and looks him deep in the eye. “I love you so, so much. Don’t ever doubt that, please. I’m not leaving you here because I want to but because I know you need help that I can’t give you. I know it’s beyond impossible for you to see that right now but things will get better, okay? I promise you that.”

“You can’t,” wails Loki.

“Yes, honey, I can. You’re safe here and these people will take good care of you, okay?” Frigga says, apparently waiting for him to fucking agree.

 _Yeah_ , _right_.

Loki’s face still in her hands, she brushes a kiss against his forehead. “I love you. I’ll talk to you as soon as I can.”

“I l-love you, too,” Loki chokes out as he hugs her goodbye. _Good-fucking-bye_. How is that even ... how is he supposed to even function in this building without ... how ... what ... His mind blanks because Frigga turns around again, _leaving_ again, turning his whole world upside down, _fucking hell_ , he’s such a pathetic little wimp crying for his—

Loki tries to jerk away to run after her but Dr. van Dyne holds him back until Frigga reaches the end of the corridor and vanishes through the doors, Maria Hill slipping through after her, and then she’s gone. His mama is gone.

He’s alone.

His world spins off its axis.

 _Mama_.

He should have taken all of Thor’s pills.

* * *

At first, it’s the aftershocks. Doctors and nurses talk to him while they’re doing the thoroughest check-up in the history of thorough medical check-ups (blood and urine samples, blood pressure monitor, EKG, lung function test, eye examination, MRI, fucking x-rays etc. etc.) but Loki just can’t seem to get a single word out of his mouth. They tell him to walk a straight line (nigh impossible), they pound the spot just below his knees to test his reflexes (zilch, zero, nada), they shine a light into his pupils (eeek), they weigh him but won’t tell him what the scales say (I beg your fucking pardon?), they chip his black polish off one nail (the hell) and scribble something onto a chart while Loki stares at his blue nail (so fucking cold all the time), trying to make conversation all the way through. They call him ‘darling’ and ‘sweetie’ and it’s pissing him off to no fucking end but he doesn’t complain.

Because even if he’s sure he’ll be able to speak again after a while, he just doesn’t and it irks them, he’s sure of it. Maybe he can use that.

Therapy is an interactional achievement after all and silence a powerful communicative tool. Therapy stands and falls with the client’s cooperation and, _no surprise there_ , cooperation is the last thing on Loki’s mind right now. He would’ve agreed to see a therapist once a week, hell, he even fucking said so just before Odin and Nikias lost their freaking shit, but he won’t cooperate under these conditions. He won’t cooperate as long as he is locked up in some mental institution like the undesirable human scum that he is just because his poor, poor family can’t deal with him and society frowns upon vermin like him. ( _Did you actually read Freud_? _That’s quite impressive at your age_.) Guess what, he read Foucault too when Thor was sweating in the gym the other day and what that man had to say about the constitution of madness as mental illness in modern times and the subsequent segregation of society into the sane and the insane was certainly enlightening.

Which is why, when Dr. van Dyne asks him all sorts of questions after his physical exam, Loki keeps his lips tightly sealed. They’ll get nothing from him, he decides then, not a single syllable, not a single nod or even a half-shrug. He’ll keep his mouth shut for as long as it takes.

 _Why do you always have to make everything so difficult for everyone_ , _son_?

 _Because I fucking can_ , _father_.

Yes, Loki can be insanely difficult on purpose and very, very persistent if he sets his mind on it.

Dr. van Dyne nods her understanding as soon as she figures out what Loki is trying to do. She even smirks a little and then she leaves him be. For now. She probably thinks he’ll cave at some point but he won’t. They won’t fucking break him, no, he’ll break them. He won’t say another word until they let him go back home and they’d better not underestimate him.

* * *

The other patients look, well, he’s surprised by how bland and un-traumatized they look when he sits down at the dinner table (not by choice, of course). He was on some level aware that they wouldn’t resemble the overdramatized depictions one sees of people in mental health institutions in pop-cultural media but he still expected the patients to look sicker, more fucked-up. More like him, basically. He also expected them to be younger but most of them are a lot older than him, with one man looking as if he’s well into his fifties. A grown-up treatment center then. _Nice_. They nod hello when a nurse introduces Loki and if he weren’t sulking, he’d probably quip that he didn’t know whether he should be relieved or disappointed that there was no chorus of ‘Hi, Loki’ greeting him. Anyway.

He keeps his lips shut and his gaze down because he’s still fucking embarrassed by the tantrum he threw earlier; which makes him feel even more pathetic now that he realized they’re all grown-ups. He tries to eat but the food seems to expand in his mouth as he chews and he puts the fork down again after a few bites.

“What’s your name?” asks the young woman sitting next to him. She has dark brown hair, a heavy Slavic accent and she is the youngest among the others, a bit older than Loki maybe. She flicks him a shy smile.

“My name is Wanda,” she continues ( _did I ask_?). “I, uh, saw you with your mother earlier. That must have been very tough. It’s hard, at first, you know.”

Loki glares at her until she gives up and focuses on her dinner again.

The other patients shuffle over to a seating area after dinner to talk about their day and their feelings in the last group session of the day before they’re allowed to play games or read or watch TV. There is a woman—blonde, slender, mid-thirties—who talks about triggers while glancing nervously in Loki’s direction every now and then and picking at her fingers in between. There is a man who talks about the confrontation he had with his mother.

Loki’s mind wanders.

“What about you, Loki? Do you want to tell us how your day was?”

He scoffs inwardly and then stares, holding the nurse’s gaze. He doesn’t shrug, doesn’t nod, doesn’t speak. It’s hard but he won’t break. He won’t.

* * *

He breaks during night ( _are we really fucking surprised_?) when his guards are down and his night terrors ambush him. He screams, kicks and cries, waking up the whole unit. They put Frigga on the phone then and he pleads with her to take him home. She says no she can’t, _honey_ , _you know I can’t_ , yadda yadda yadda, and Loki hangs up on her even if it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

The following days are a blur. Loki is in withdrawal and he’s itchy and so fucking pissed and so fucking lonely and scared and fed-up with everything. Sometimes, he screams out of nowhere (no words, just screams, wordless screams don’t count). Throws himself onto the floor or against the wall. Breaks down crying. He has to spend a lot of time in the padded room with nothing to hurt himself with, so he scratches his skin open, his forehead, his cheeks, the back of his hands, anything.

This unsettles everyone else, which is a nice bonus, so he keeps doing it.

They trim his nails then.

They put him on a specialized meal plan too and make him stay at the table until he’s eaten his food as if he was a fucking child and then monitor his bathroom visits afterwards. He wants to tell them that he doesn’t have an eating disorder but that’d involve speaking. He chokes it down. The food is disgusting.

Dr. van Dyne tries to appeal to his intelligence in their first session. “I’m sure you’re smart enough to realize that you aren’t hurting anyone except yourself with your refusal,” she says. “You’re cheating yourself out of a chance to heal from the traumas you suffered and to learn to live with those voices inside your head. Is that really what you want?” 

“We can’t put you on any medication until you talk to us,” she says.

She frequently reminds him of the session they had in September (“You wanted me to help you then, didn’t you? What changed?”) and appeals to his empathy too (“Are you aware of the effect your behavior has on the other patients?”).

Yes, Ma’am, but maybe I just don’t care because, guess what, I am a terrible fucking person who didn’t hesitate to lure underage girls into a filthy ass porn studio.

Loki keeps silent and Dr. van Dyne starts therapy with Killian after a few days because that’s what Mr. Jörmungandr decides is gonna happen, which is fine with Loki, really, because the arrangement gives him an hour in the jungle twice a week. Not that the jungle is his favorite place to be but at least he can speak there and it’s no mental hospital (small favors and such). Nikias is nowhere to be found during those times, the coward, so he spends his time with Leah. They build wigwams with tree branches and twigs and play the floor is lava (which is fun in a jungle) or tag (which isn’t). Leah misses Frigga too, she tells him one day, and Loki balls up on the floor in his room later, crying his rotten, broken, little heart out.

After a week, Frigga is allowed to visit. Loki doesn’t say anything to her either even if it eats him alive but he’s a man on a mission and he’ll be damned if he messes it up now. He has the feeling he’s almost there.

He screams for her later that night though, cursing himself that he missed his chance to throw himself into his mother’s arms. _Pathetic_. _So fucking pathetic_. He kicks and punches the nurse, shoves her against a wall. He cries for over two hours, until they finally show mercy and give him a sedative.

Yes, he should have taken all of Thor’s pills because there’s no fucking hope for him, is there?

* * *

There’s a drug cabinet in the nurses’ lounge, which is guarded at all times, except for that one slot in the middle of the night when the nurse is doing their rounds. Loki pads towards it on bare feet after studying the movements of the nightshift for a few days and quickly works the lock with a safety pin he snatched from Dr. van Dyne’s desk after distracting her by staring a hole into the bookcase behind her back. Of course she turned around to see what Loki was looking at. People are so fucking predictable, aren’t they?

Quick now, the lock of the cabinet. This one is a bit trickier but he manages eventually and grabs a bottle of sleeping pills. It’s half full and he swallows the remaining pills down in one go, then waits.

The numbness he craved envelops him almost instantly and the last thing Loki hears from very far away inside his own head before unconsciousness pulls him under are the lyrics of a song he stumbled across by accident and then played on repeat for weeks a few months ago.

_I want to feel  
All the chemicals inside  
I want to feel  
I want a sunburn  
Just to know that I’m alive  
To know I’m alive_

_And don’t tell me if I’m dying  
‘Cause I don’t want to know  
If I can’t see the sun  
Maybe I should go  
Donʼt wake me ‘cause I’m dreaming  
Of angels on the moon  
Where everyone you know  
Never leaves too soon_

_This is to one last day in the shadows  
And to know a brother’s love  
This is to New York City angels  
And the rivers of our blood  
This is to all of us  
To all of us_

_Yeah you can tell me all your thoughts  
About the stars that fill polluted skies  
And show me where you run to  
When no one’s left to take your side  
Don’t tell me where the road ends  
‘Cause I just don't want to know  
No I don't want to know_

_And don’t tell me if I’m dying  
Don’t tell me if I’m dying_

Well, he doesn’t die because, _news flash_ , Loki isn’t that lucky.

He wakes again in the morning and when he does, Frigga is sitting on the edge of his bed, crying tonelessly as she pets his head.

Loki doesn’t tell her that he loves her or that he’s glad to see her or that he’s sorry. He’s so far gone that he threatens he’ll try again if she doesn’t take him back home. She takes a deep breath then and withdraws her hand. “I know you’re in pain, sweetie, and I hate to see you suffer so much but I won’t ... You’re trying to manipulate me and your words put me under a lot of emotional pressure.”

 _That is the plan_ , _mother_.

“I know it’s hard for you to see that right now but you’re not the only one in this family who is hurting and if you threaten me with suicide, you’re trying to make me responsible for something I have no control over,” she continues, irritatingly unfazed. “You’re trying to make me feel guilty for something I can’t change and the way you continue to accuse me of not loving you enough ...” Her voice breaks. _Shit_. “Honey, I’m your mother in every sense that matters and I love you and I’ll always be there for you but I can’t allow you to drive me into a corner like this anymore.”

“Did your shrink told you to tell me that?” Loki lashes out, throwing all the snark he’s got left at her because, well, he’s fucked-up and dealing with other people’s emotions when he can’t even control his own is just too much. “You know what? Don’t tell me. Just go.”

“If that’s what you wish,” says Frigga. Her eyes are glistering wet.

 _Fuck_.

“Is it?”

 _Tell her you’re sorry_ , _you fucking idiot_! _Tell her you love her_. _Tell her you need her_. _You’ll regret it if you don’t_. _You’ll only end up breaking down again if you let her go now_.

He doesn’t. He can’t.

Frigga stands up, kisses his head and tells him that she loves him.

And leaves.

He dies then.

They tell him they can’t go on like this later that day and what should have felt like a triumph makes Loki feel utterly wretched and miserable because the torch of justice that has been shining so brightly on his side of the argument before has slowly died down.

 _And what now_ , _Loki_ , _hm?_

 _What now_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Trigger warnings for substance abuse, suicidal ideation, actual suicide attempt and self-harming behavior**
> 
> Whew, Loki thinks he's so smart, doesn't he? *sighs* Oh Loki, baby, honey, if you put all this energy into therapy instead of sabotaging yourself, you could really be making some actual progress.
> 
> The song Loki listened to is [Angels on the Moon by Thriving Ivory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REJl3n60rOo). While planning this series, I imagined Loki singing this on a karaoke machine when Thor returns home in Breaking Point and I was so very, very sure that this was how they'd meet again for MONTHS. It didn't happen that way eventually, as you all know, and I kinda forgot about the song (which is a crime in itself) but now it came up again. Never discard any ideas, fellow writers. They might come in handy at a muuuch later point in the story. 
> 
> And yes, Thor realized that Nikias was back. He's really been paying attention to his little brother. Let's give him a gold star, yes?
> 
> Let me know what you think about Frigga's reaction if you find a moment to drop a comment. Your thoughts will be appreciated x
> 
> Oh, PS: For those of you who were worried about the whole _things-always-get-worse-before-they-get-better-yes-but-just-how-many-rock-bottoms-are-there-for-Loki-to-get-to_ atmosphere that has been hanging over this fic like the Sword of Damocles itself since day one, I can finally say that **this** is it. There will be setbacks of course because recovery is never a straight path but we'll be making slow, delicate progress from now on, I swear. 
> 
> Loki deserves it.
> 
> Thanks for reading and see y'all soon I hope x

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for taking this road with me thus far and please leave a comment if you can even if it's just a ♥ Every type of feedback is greatly appreciated x


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